Hook Echoes

Car Free?

2011-07-19T08:29:00.000-07:00

So I've been riding the bus quite a bit lately, for a number of reasons. The car is on its last legs, work is close to home, and I need the exercise....plus most of the time it's kind of fun. And let's not forget the $140 a month I'm saving in gas, which is a good thing. And as long as I'm a student, the bus and train are free.

The natural continuation of this is "why the hell do I have a car at all?" Why not just cancel the insurance and give ol' Bessie to KUT? Car 2 Go has a place not far from the house that I could use to rent a Smart car by the hour, which is pretty awesome. And for the semi-annual trips to the parents up in Oklahoma, wouldn't it be cool to rent a big ol' Cadillac for the drive?

Some problems: Smart cars don't carry two kids. There's some question about whether they should even carry one, come to think of it. Also, having two cars is convenient. I had to replace a dead battery for K recently, but she didn't miss work or have to do anything icky with her car because she was able to take mine. I suppose that might be remedied with a Car 2 Go setup, but it would be complicated. Car 2 Go charges by the hour, unless you drop it off in a recognized "zone." I don't know that there are any zones close enough to K's work to make that practical, and I'd still be looking at a pretty long walk if I chose to use it to commute from time to time. And I _did_ miss the bus the other day. I'd have been late without my car.

Then, not to get too far into my mother's line of reasoning, WHAT IF SOMETHING HORRIBLE HAPPENED TO THE KIDS WHEN KIMMIE WAS AWAY FROM HOME IN HER CAR?

And finally, as it stands now I have an alternative to driving a pink jeep with eyelashes. This alternative would really go away, unless I was able to utilize the Car 2 Go thing.

For now, getting rid of the car would only save me about $60 a month. But, since the car is dying, it would pretty soon mean saving me a car payment. And I can't see paying $400 a month to have a car that sits in the street 99% of the time. I'd probably be back to commuting, if only to justify the money spent.

Bah.

Tactics For Dealing With Assholes

2011-06-16T06:17:00.000-07:00

So K's "on travel" this week, leaving me to play single dad. Which I'm fine with, don't get me wrong--it's fun, in the short term, when mom's away. Reminds me of my childhood, a bit--when Dad went TDY, Mom "cooked" TV dinners and things were generally much more relaxed.

But Wednesday nights are nights when K generally takes the boys to their grandmother's house to eat dinner with their dad. She does this because a) the boys want to see their dad, b) because it's nice to have some time alone with yer partner during the week, and c) because he's a dickhead who doesn't have a car. And possibly d) she's nice.

I pointed out last weekend that I wasn't keen on doing the drop off/pickup thing on Wednesday--the kids are going to see the guy in two days anyway, and I'm not inclined to jump through hoops just so dude can feed them strawberries for dinner while watching "America's Funniest Kittens" or whatever. There's something that irks me about bringing him his kids, then waiting 2 hours to go get his kids and continue taking care of them. Perhaps if I was a biological parent, I'd look at it differently. But I'm not.

So, naturally, the guy doesn't call yesterday during the day. I'm sure we're both busy--I spent yesterday reconciling payment and transaction data between the DOT and their collections agency, and I imagine he spent yesterday smoking cigarettes and bearing down on "One Life to Live." But come six o'clock, when they're supposed to be at his house, still no phone call. Guess he didn't want to deal with me.

Squared the kids away with dinner, and advised them that I was going to be taking an economics quiz--which, this online econ class is a good reason for another post, if I get around to it. The critical thing about this quiz, from the standpoint of this story, is that it's timed. And, you know, it's kind of hard. Something you have to concentrate on, and concentration's difficult for me when I'm pissed off.

Naturally, he calls when I'm in the middle of it. 6:37pm, because I looked at the clock. Math in my head confirms my feeling-even if I was able to drop everything and take them, what's the point in taking them for an hour? I send the call to voicemail.

Once I'm finished with the quiz, I thought I'd try to grow myself a little bit and actually call the guy back. I haven't yet run across a situation in which I benefited to reach out to him, but whatever. This is what grown, responsible people do. Return calls. Right?

So I call the number, and after a few rings and some light conversation with his sister, I get him. Apologized for missing his call, explained the timed test thing. Pointed out that since it's now 7pm, it's not really efficient for me to bring the kids for an hour. But I'd be happy to let him talk to the kids on the phone.

His response: you can still drop them off over here for two hours.

Not "yeah, you're right," or "yeah, I should have called earlier to make a plan," or "I really want to see my kids, how about I come get them instead?" All of these potential outcomes are so unlikely that I actually had to do some work to sort of put those words in his mouth...

My response: "well, no, as I said, it's...."

The fucker hung up on me.

Which made me kind of mad (although I've been in this game long enough to recognize that being hung up on is better than being screamed at), but I considered it a teachable moment for the kids--who had long ago figured out that they weren't going to hang out with daddy today.

"Well, kids, I just got off the phone with your daddy, who isn't very happy with me right now. In fact he kind of acted like a jerk. Which is somewhat understandable in that he didn't get what he want, and some people think it's OK to act like a jerk when you don't get what you want. Which is not how we want YOU to be, of course, but we can't really do much about your father at this stage. The thing that you should learn from this is that you get a lot more of what you want when you communicate and plan with the people who are involved in your getting what you want. For instance, had your daddy planned something with me, or called me beforehand, there's a good chance he would have gotten what he wanted. Instead he didn't get what he wanted, and acted like a jerk."

Followed shortly by:

"I'm sorry you don't get to see your daddy tonight. But I think I've got the next best thing here."

To which Eddie responded: "Ice cream?"

Dinner Tonight!

2011-01-01T17:09:00.001-08:00

Sort of a date night--the kids are gone, at least. I copied this from the other, long dead blog:

Slammin Steak Kyoto

Shamelessly ripped from the pages of the Weber grill brochure, and put here primarily so I can recycle said brochure:

1/3 cup Vi Dai Bo De soy sauce (or some other low salt/Asian soy, not that Chung King Americanized crap)

1/4 cup orange juice concentrate (not sure about this, but I just used OJ)
2 T olive oil
2 t tomato sauce
1 t or so green onion
1 t lemon juice
1/2 t prepared mustard (I used dijon)
1/2 t minced ginger root
1 clove garlic, minced.

4 big ass salmon steaks

marinade the steaks in all the above for an hour or so, then grill the salmon skin side down with Direct Medium heat til it's done (doesn't take long, 5 to 10 minutes). Boil the marinade for at least 1 full minute to kill nasty food bugs from the fish, the use as a sauce fur deine feesh.

Job Angst

2010-01-30T22:00:00.000-08:00

"And you may ask yourself: How do I work this?"

That's me. This stupid song's been running through my head for 3 weeks now, I think.

I have a Management job. It's a grown up job--handling money and a relatively fragile reputation for the TXDOT and toll roads in Central Texas. Dealing, I hear, with POLICE on a daily basis. It involves Meetings and Corner Offices. I've gone from a work station (not a Cube, even) directly to this office, skipping Cubes and the top levels of middle management...I guess. They tell me I'm moving into capital-M Management, and given the way people are bein' all nice to me now, I guess They are right.

And it's not that much more money. It's substantially more money than I'm making now, but somehow there's a disconnect between the way people are acting and what I know will be on my paycheck two Fridays from now. My new peers and boss are doing their best to make me feel like I've "arrived," and the aforementioned corner office is nice, but...if I'm not clearly in a new tax bracket, but people are either doing their best to hump my leg or telling me that people are going to start humping my leg any time I go outside, where am I?

I've owned it--it's not like I don't enjoy my job. I'm a spreadsheet nerd, a data geek, and I don't care. I got the damn job because I was the only person who could pass a relatively simple spreadsheet test, and that's sad. I know I don't sell myself well, and while I didn't freeze up and blurt something about being a professional fire breather, I know the other applicants did well at the talking bit.

Sigh...I have a reputation, it seems, around the workplace. I'm "really smart," and "know everything about Excel." And I'm weird looking--I think I'm the only guy in the building with long hair, and I'm certainly the only guy who has tattoos bigger than some half-assed Sigma-Chi late night drive to Gainesville on his tit. Being weird looking but not too threatening kind of helps you with people in ties, I think--you can be a kind of useful pet.

I work for a GIANT construction firm, and I think what has happened is that I'm being pulled up from the -local- workforce into the lowest ranks of the actual company. I'm replacing (sort of) a guy who's moved off to Florida to do the job of the guy who's three or four pay grades above his boss here...

Everyone keeps telling me "you'll do great." I KNOW I'll do great. I may spend 20 hours a week extra at work, which will suck, but I'll do it and feel good about it even as my carefully built and genuinely happy home life crumbles around my unhearing ears.

Feh. I'm confident in my ability to do the work. It's spreadsheet analysis and navigating the database, and acting like I know what I'm doing.

What I'm not sure of is whether I'm going to become one of Them, or whether that sort of dichotomy really exists at all.

Description of Cute Behavior

2009-11-13T18:31:00.000-08:00

I'm in bed with the laptop, avoiding Stupid Roommate. The kids brush teeth and the elder, Freddie, comes and does normal hugs/wrestling with me (he's too adult, at six, for man-on-man kisses, which is kinda funny). During the good night stuff, this sort of thing begins:

"Hey, where's Eddie the Younger? Isn't he coming for hugs and kisses?"

Starting at the foot of the bed, moving stealthily clockwise, the rustle rustle rustle of jammies on low-nap carpet.

"Man, Freddie, is that a cat I hear down there?"

No rustling.

"I guess you should go find your brother. I wonder where he is..."

Excited, muffled breathing from approximately the same spot where the rustling stopped.

"Man, I guess I should go brush my teeth, but first I'm going to look in my closet for the clothes I want to wear tomorrow."

A second's thought, then hurried rustling counterclockwise away from where I'll be putting my foot. A tuft of reddish blonde hair appears between my feet, beyond the foot of the bed.

"Wow, I wonder where Eddie is?"

SILENCE. Then the sound of a finger being drawn across a half-snotty nose.

"Well, heck, I guess I'll just call it a night. Sure wish I coulda..."

Suddenly, a small boy in lizard jammies flops onto the bed, scrabbling frantically up to rub his mucus on my chin.

It's bed time. Man, I love this life.

Sick Dork

2009-10-10T20:26:00.000-07:00

I'm still fighting a fucked up back (for the last 10 years I just THOUGHT I had a back problem), and I'm not quite finished ripping this DVD of "Inferno," which you really ought to check out. Dario Argento before he became a caricature of a caricature.

The E man has had straight Wows since he had a come to Jesus moment on Monday after hitting a kid in line to do something. I can't tell if this is due to the talk I gave him or the spreadsheet I started building for him and his brother immediately afterwards. After dinner ever night, now, we've come to the laptop and booted up OpenOffice.org's Calc, to update everyone's grades (behavior and legitimate test scores).

I bought K a big fat pink Ipod for her birthday, end of October. Don't tell her-it's one of the new Nanos, because she runs with it (bless her), and because it has an integrated radio receiver. Hopefully I get it with time enough to either a) make a thoughtful playlist of all of "our" songs over the last 2 years, or b) shoot 10 minutes of video down my pants. I sure do love that girl.

Being Sad Vs Being Angry

2009-09-30T17:45:00.000-07:00

I'm (mostly) pretending to be bummed out. Eddie, the younger, is in kindergarten, and is predictably acting out. He's not terrible, mind you, but his behavior warrants damn near daily write homes from the teacher.

Well, that's not the whole story. He brings home a daily behavior scorecard every day--if he behaved well, he gets a "wow!" stamp. If he behaved poorly, there's generally a short note describing the infraction. Straight "wows" gets you an ice cream on Friday, but the E Man either doesn't give a shit about ice cream or can't grok a reward that is five days away.

Worse, he's not really motivated at school. He's easily distracted, and most of his troubles can be classified in the "isn't paying attention" section of the daily report. It sounds a lot like me as a young adult, actually, which scares me enough that I make a pretty big deal about "wows" and bad days.

But the poor guy just can't seem to catch on. He'll do well for a couple of days, and then slink home with bad reports for the next three. There are discussions nightly about what happened, good or bad, and he's actually gotten better about retaining what he got in trouble for. But that's just the first, really low, hurdle.

Worse, I'm not sure the freakin' teacher's on the level. K thinks "she's kind of a hippie," and some of the bad conduct reports seem pretty small minded. "Skipping in line" comes to mind, and "pushed the button on the water fountain while in line" does too. On the other hand, "poked another student with a pencil" and "playing with acorn instead of listening in class" come to mind, too.

As a parent, I learned pretty quickly that you have to be pretty careful about getting angry as a means of controlling the kids. It's not that it scares them or gets my blood pressure up, it's that there's just not a lot of wiggle room in being mad. Threatening a 3 year old, while fun, has to escalate pretty quickly into giving a spanking to said 3 year old, which isn't really fun at all. And from the beginning (age 3), that's about all Eddie understood.

But he's fucking FIVE now, and he's learned about all the lessons that I think spanking's going to teach him. He's got all the major rules down, and is, in fact, a very well behaved and polite child. Not to mention sweet and cute and all that other stuff. We're past the power struggles, in other words, and I think now it's more an issue of motivating him to do well.

The problem is that not much seems to work. The stick (spankings) is no longer really appropriate--he doesn't do anything bad enough to warrant a serious punishment like that. However, carrots don't have much of an effect either--witness the utter lack of ice-cream Fridays in his life.

Treating him like an employee hasn't worked very well, either. "So, Eddie, your productivity has been down this week. Is there something I can do to help you?" Hell, he doesn't know anything other than he's constantly getting in trouble for not paying attention. I can see it in his eyes: "yeah, you can help me. Get in my brain at school and make me pay attention."

So tonight's discussion ended with me telling him I was very sad that he wasn't working hard enough in school, disappointed with him about his behavior, etc etc.. I'm just at a loss as to where to go from here.

Oh, in other news I've been promoted, temporarily, to call center supervisor. More money, for the next couple of months, and some unknown increase in responsibilities. It's kids all the way down, it looks like.

Pity, Not To Be Confused With Friendship

2009-09-23T18:15:00.000-07:00

So I've been living with Kimmie for over a year now. Next month we'll have been dating for two whole years, although it seems like much longer (and might be-perhaps I should look at the GCalendar). We have a really good life--enough money, and bad enough financial habits that we treat each other pretty well; good kids, who enjoy watching me play video games; and a pretty decent set of friends, most of whom show up for dinner now and again. Ahem.

I've said for quite a while that I feel like I'm living in the opening scenes of a horror movie. Something this good and stable cannot merely be the beginning montage in a cheater's melodrama. There's going to have to be some serious ectoplasm, and probably some dwarves, before this is all over with.

But my nervousness at the perfection of the situation was assuaged when Kimmie told me about her friend Kelley, a horrible old hippie redneck biker chick that she's been friends with for the last few years. I'd met her once last year, when she made the trip up from Houston to spend the weekend for Kimmie's birthday. At the time, I felt that she was one of those annoying but distant friends that I'd probably have to deal with a couple of times a year.

Kelley's been officially destitute for a couple of months now, and with great reluctance (and a little bit of assholish behavior), I consented to let Kelley stay here to "get on her feet."

This is a big deal for me. I don't LIKE people in my space, yo, and there are days when I crave that hour of quiet like I never, ever craved beer, sex or cocaine. My oasis of calm has been the "office," which has really developed into my old apartment in microcosm, only cleaner. The most important feature remains, naturally, my computer, although a close second would be the futon. It doubles as the guest room, you see, and thus it's been effectively off-limits to me since August 1st.

Which is why I'm writing this on a bad ass new laptop, incidentally, but I digress.

This woman is maddening in the extreme--not just because she's an obnoxious loser, but because she can get her act together for just long enough to make me look bad. I could have sworn at the outset that she wasn't going to even get a job, for instance, but she's now got three part time gigs. Now, none of them are stable, and I would still bet the farm that she's not saving any money towards Getting The Fuck Out of My House, but she's got three damn jobs.

Worse, she's a cryer. She exhibits more self pity than Bill Laimbeer on the floor of wherever the Detroit Pistons used to play. I've yet to hear her say anything was unequivocally her fault, and most of the drivel I've accidentally run into (because I learned really quickly to stay back here in the bedroom with the ipod turned up and the door shut) runs along in the "why is this happening to me?" or "I can't do this, I need help" vein. It's sickening.

I knew we were in for it, friends, when Kimmie went down to help her move and found that a) nothing had been packed, but b) a couple of friends who were willing to drop everything to ensure that Kelley got out of Houston with absolutely no reason to come back, ever. They even gave her a car, ladies and gents, and drove here to drop off clothes when it didn't look like the UHaul was going to hold everything.

I've watched with horror, pity, and a little bit of self-righteousness (Kimmie would say a LOT of that, probably) as things have gone from bad to (slowly, subtly) worse. The husband she decided to "leave for good" has taken to calling and texting her regularly, then blocking her for reasons unknown on various social networking sites. She can't seem to make it to ANY of her jobs on time, and for various reasons all three of those won't keep her on past February. Which would be OK, for me, because I was smart. I set ground rules:

1) December 1st, she moves out. That's four months of living rent, bill, and food free.
2) She doesn't pay a dime, as you might have guessed-every penny she makes should go to Getting Out of My House.
3) No Dudes. You're destitute. You're not schtupping some gi-tarr player on my freakin' futon.
4) Monthly updates on how the move is going. How much money you'll need, how much money you've saved, etc etc.. This should be a no brainer-she's in her late 40's, after all.

But alas, she's done more whining and excuse invention than she's done anything else. She's quitting the one decent semi-permanent gig because they want to drug test her, the other weekday temp job will be over by February, although it may get moved to San Antonio before that, and her third (weekend) job is selling powdered energy drink at a stand in a San Antonio Costco. Though I hear that job may go the way of Jolt Cola pretty soon too.

But Kimmie's doing her best. I, at least, can come back here and blog. She has to listen, counsel, and Be a Friend.

It's gonna be a long couple of months. And at the end of it, I'm going to have to be a dick. I can feel it.

_Imperial Hubris_ Review

2009-06-06T13:50:00.000-07:00

Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror by Michael Scheuer aka Anonymous

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
I'm pretty disappointed. It's not terribly well written (typos galore), and it's long on criticism (some of it bitter) but short on suggestions. Some of the suggestions are pretty fucked up, too (build more minefields in Afghanistan?).

Most troubling is that it seems to dodge the biggest picture. Granted, members of the last 2 administrations have failed to look beyond "they hate us because we're different" and into the bigger picture of "they hate us because our foreign policy sucks." But Scheuer never really talks about the negative aspects of bin Laden's ideology.

Seriously, I'm OK with "US get out of the Arabian Peninsula." You can throw "out of Afghanistan" in there too...but bin Laden's goal is the return of the Caliphate, and the establishment of sharia in all lands that were a part of the Caliphate. Not only does this mean the destruction of Israel (be aware that I'm not particularly happy with Israel, either), it means some pretty big cultural changes in an area that hasn't been predominantly Muslim in a long damn time (part of SPAIN was a part of the Caliphate, no?).

What may be worse is Scheuer's tiptoeing around one of my big problems with the Taliban and Salafist Islam in general: the awful restrictions on women. He mentions, once (I believe), that the Taliban does not approve of "western feminism." Which is kind of like saying the Japanese behaved badly in Nanking. How are we going to reconcile human rights with a repressive brand of Islam? I've no clue. And neither, apparently, does the author.

View all my reviews.

P4140058

2009-05-16T12:00:00.001-07:00

P4140058
Originally uploaded by houdinisblind

Shower is tiled and grouted, although this picture was taken before we cleaned the grout off the tiles (if you take anything away from this blog, Reader, it's that you always clean off the grout when it's wet).

Obligatory "Little Shop of Horrors" Quote Here

2009-05-16T11:58:00.001-07:00

P4210012
Originally uploaded by houdinisblind

That's the zucchini plant. One single plant. I think it eats squirrels.

P4230018

2009-05-16T11:55:00.001-07:00

P4230018
Originally uploaded by houdinisblind

Stage one of the bathroom is mostly complete, here. We still need trim paint and some chair rail, as well as new knobs and towel racks (towel bars are EXPENSIVE), but that's about it.

Phase 2: tile floor and toilet backsplash, probably next weekend. Since K will be gone, I can play with her tile saw!

Hardibacker Nightmare.

2009-04-22T05:54:00.001-07:00

P4030024
Originally uploaded by houdinisblind

Man, I HATE this stuff. It's like drywall, except it's WAY heavier. And moisture resistant, so it's kind of what you have to use in shower/tub situations.

They tell you that you cut it by scoring and breaking, like glass. This is true, just like it's true that you could crawl to Las Fucking Vegas on your hands and knees.

And speaking of Nevada, after about 15 minutes of cutting the stuff, I felt like I was back on the playa. Except that on the playa I'd have a bandana, but I wasn't smart enough to make that connection until about 30 seconds ago.

I'm here to tell you: you can cut hardibacker with a skil saw, if you're not too worried about your blade. And since the blade on my saw came with the saw, back in 1984, I think it's already had a good long life.

Today, there's one more wall to install (hardiback?), new tub and shower hardware, and maybe the beginning of tile. I also need to get some new siding for the front of the house, and tack that up. I feel undressed.

Hi Neighbors!

2009-04-22T05:42:00.001-07:00

Hi Neighbors!
Originally uploaded by houdinisblind

This is the bathroom at its worst (hopefully).

Inside After Day 1

2009-04-21T06:30:00.001-07:00

P4020012
Originally uploaded by houdinisblind

There's something satisfying about knocking down walls. Flying shards of porcelain add just enough danger to keep things interesting, and hearing things fall and break in the tub (protected by painter's plastic, which kept giving me Prog flashbacks) was satisfying.

You can see the window, since this is an earlier picture, but you can't really see how rotten the wood is. The house had termites years ago, and that combined with water seepage means I have to replace pretty much everything you see in this picture.

I think I can do it. Once you get over the weird mental hurdle of Taking Out The Entire Wall (the neighbors can see me brushing my teeth!), it's just a collection of lumber and building material. Smart guy like me can see why the lumber is arranged in such a way, so as long as I put it back pretty much the way it was, hell, why WOULDN'T I do it?

The only thing I'm concerned about is doing something to my back that incapacitates me during the week I've taken off work, probably with a giant hole in the side of the house. Here's hoping that doesn't happen.

The Outside, After Day 1

2009-04-21T06:18:00.001-07:00

P4020017
Originally uploaded by houdinisblind

This really doesn't do justice to the time and energyI spent just getting a window out. I will say that the window is really only about 2/3 the size of the hole you see. And a lot of the time was spent trying to be subtle and avoid destruction of the siding, which in retrospect was kind of silly.

Still, I'm looking forward to today's work, which entails completely ripping out the wall you see in that picture, and replacing it by the end of the day. If I'm REALLY good, there will be glass bricks where the window was...

The Destruction of The Bathroom

2009-04-19T13:35:00.001-07:00

Since I moved in with Kimmie, I've been planning an attack on the bathroom. There's a hole in the shower wall already, through which you can see the inside of the exterior wall. The bathroom sink's starting to rust out. There are mysterious holes, drilled in the 1980's white glitzy formica, from which issue impressive streams of little black ants, some of which end up on my toothbrush every night.

This assault begins tomorrow. I'll post pictures.

Planting

2009-03-21T14:09:00.000-07:00

Man, I'm old. By the time I got home with the supplies this morning, I was hurting. Now? I'm scaling back dinner plans because I'm just too tired to whip up the garlic confit I was gonna use to stuff the (half thawed) pork loin.

But things got accomplished. Sort of. Projects were moved further along, at least.

Take the ongoing redesign of the compost bin. I managed to build it out of landscape timbers K had lying around the place, and fenced it off from the coons and possums and occasional stray dog with chicken wire and aluminum tubing (yes, it was ghetto, but it was FREE).

But the coons have developed quite a vertical leap, and have mashed down the wire in a couple of places to make their escape. Twas more of a mess than when I started...til today.

Today, off to the Big Box Store for tposts and more wire. And to my surprise: PLASTIC "poultry netting." In essence, smaller "gauge" construction fence, much easier to work with. PURCHASE!

Get home, tear down and roll up the existing fence...drive my posts (with the new post driver, thank you very much)...stretch the fence nice and straight...oh god, so good...so professional...

Four feet short. I have an open side, so now my arrow-straight and Berlin Wall-high compost fence is even less effective than the mashed down, floppy and pokey chicken wire and aluminum stick contraption I had this morning. About the only critter this fence is going to fool is Spot the Cat, who sometimes gives the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Tra'al a run for its money.

So, mostly done.

OTOH, all the plants I own are in the ground, finally. I've decided that vegetables and fruit plants will grow in the ground, and herbs will grow in pots. I've had pretty good success overwintering my oregano and thyme, not to mention the three year old bird pepper plant...but that's mostly due to judicious pullings-into-garages during the cold snaps that pass for winter down here.

And there are purple petunias in the window box. THAT project's done, finally.

Mixed Spring Greens

2009-02-25T19:05:00.000-08:00

Man, what a night. How many different threads do I have that are worth talking about, to me? Four? Five?

First, and most important, it's spring. I know, you northerners (which is damn near everyone but Houston fokes, it's true) can kvetch, but it's been in the 80's here for a couple days, and tonight I intend to leave the windows open. It's spring. Primafuckingvera. The end of cabsavs and goulash and the merciless flogging of the Gourd. We're in the between period, a thing I've always loved...because of the smells.

Smells are constant. For me, tonight...it's the smell of Grandma's house and a gravel driveway under a full moon, ramshackle chicken houses, bluestem waking up. Freshness, wetness. Aliveness. Trees throwing their woody cares to the wind and getting on with the business of photosynthesis and pollen.

And here in Austin, there's an even bigger, wilder sense of waking up. Shit, Home Depot still has foxtail palms from LAST YEAR, and weird-ass citrus crosses like the Lemon Drop, a cannily named (considering) cross between the lemon and the kumquat.

I looked up at the sky tonight, as I was dragging the tubs of trash out to the curb...looking for the moon, and the comet I hear might be visible behind the Cubano's casa down the street. But even as I was sucking up the NOW (because, with kids, you'd better suck up the fucking NOW, because otherwise you'll be brainless PTA fodder by the time the little bastards get to second grade)....even as I was sucking up the NOW I was going back through my meticulously organized aisles of memories, on my belly snatching things off the lowest shelves, like you do...

The silver cattle guard at my grandmother's house, first afeard of alligators, then leaping it in the mad dash for the bus, then bemused by the drift of gravel that made it ineffective, about the time my grandmother wasted away.

Driving home from Parker and Ed/Hippie Dave/Osborn/Ryan S parties, at midnight or at 6am, past a magnolia tree. That tree only bloomed half a dozen times...

Ah, crap. Must go. The evening winds to a close. It's a good life.

Can I Just Skip the Title?

2009-02-21T19:11:00.000-08:00

I was just thinking how radically different my evenings are these days, compared to...well, any other time in my life.

Weeknights in the past: work til 9pm, get Chinese delivery or pizza, drink, watch a bad movie, fall asleep.

Weeknights now: work til 4pm, get the kids, fix dinner, bathe the kids, brush teeth, crack the whip over jammie time, possibly play a little Halo, read a story, drink a whiskey/soda, crash out at 9pm.

Weekends in the past: generally speaking, Oklahoma weekends were spent doing huge amounts of various drugs, running up equally ridiculous bar tabs, and occasionally going to a party.

This weekend: I dug a hole. And folded some damn jammies.

I'm going to try posting here more regularly. It won't be like the old stuff, but the old stuff was over and done with a long time ago.

Tip's Truck Mart 1: The Tow Truck

2006-04-11T19:31:00.000-07:00

Back in 95, I was living in Crackville, and my relationship with the girl I was living with was pretty much in its last throes. It got to the point that a rain day from work wasn't much of a bonus, given that I'd have to spend it with her. So when, on a rainy Friday morning, "Jim" called me up and proposed a harebrained scheme that would net me two hundred bucks, I said "sure!"

At the time, Jim was working at an auto auction. Dealers would buy used cars at the auction, then rent a car hauler to get them back to their lots. If there was an odd number of cars, though, they'd pay someone to drive the thing there. It was good money, if you could find a cheap way back.

That was to be my job--following Jim to Topeka KS in his mother's car, picking him up, and driving him back to Oklahoma City. HIS job was to drive a 1978 Chevy 2 1/2 ton tow truck. When he came to pick me up, he insisted on spending fifteen minutes digging through my tape collection, because he thought he'd seen a tape deck in the thing. While he did so, I perused his "contact sheet," a printed order showing the address and contact info. The vehicle was going to Tip's Truck Mart, and the blank beside "contact" was filled with "Max Mart." I made sure there was a phone number.

On the way to the auction lot, Jim told me how it was gonna go: we'd drive up there, drop the truck with a guy named Max, who lived behind the lot in some sort of shack at the top of some wooden steps. Max would give us cash, Jim would give me two hundred bucks, and we'd drive home. The whole exercise should take no more than thirteen hours, including the drive both ways.

Of course, I wasn't foolish enough to believe it was actually going to work like that, but it was attractive because a) it got me out of the house and away from a clingy girlfriend, b) it was a road trip, and c) it paid two hundred bucks. In no time, I was following him out of town.

14 Years Gone Now...

2006-03-24T08:11:00.000-08:00

Damn, I'm surprised this thing hasn't been deleted yet...but here we go, a short story pertaining to my recent life:

I got my job at NWL through the auspices of the mother of TLJO, who was the mother to a lot of us back in those heady days of the early, early 90's. Later, I found out that my dressing up for the job interview (complete with sportcoat and tie) was kinda unnecessary, because mom had loaned the Man some money, and was using it as a kind of crowbar to get me on there.

So, knowing the Man, he hired me with great resentment in his heart. On my 19th birthday, in fact.

The first day, I walked to work, which was all of a couple of blocks. The Man looked at me and said "you weren't supposed to start til tomorrow. Ah well, I guess I'll find something." He sent me out on a mow crew full of stoners, but warned me that I would be helping on the "bed crew" for the duration of my stay there.

A couple hours later, a guy on another of our crews caught me at a yard and asked me where the water faucet was...it was his first day, he explained, and he didn't know anything. I guess I already looked like a mowhand. That was Chuck Phoenix, Dan.

The next day I met my foreman, an idiot named Mark. Mark talked like Divine and had some serious dental issues, plus he wore baby blue sweatpants and shaved his legs, for reasons I'd rather not get into...but he had been to school for horticulture, and so I respected his authoritay.

Mark taught me to detect bullshit, actually--not because he knew how to detect it, but because he was constantly spewing it. In a way, it was like watching some indestructible moron walk through a minefield--you learn what NOT to do by watching him fuck up.

The first couple of days we spent picking weeds, and that went OK. Then we were sent to a bed install job, which basically entailed humping giant wheelbarrows of topsoil over curbs and up steep ramps, without chipping brick at the end of it. Mark lasted 3 whole days, then quit. In retrospect, Mark wasn't the one the Man wanted to quit.

A week later (a week I spent pulling weeds at old ladies' houses, listening to them talk about their grandkids or dead cats, getting fed candy, and wondering when I was gonna get paid), Mark was back, and the summer well and truly began.

Don't kid yourself. It was menial, tedious work, and I was very glad when I was moved to a mow crew, that fall.

Mowing was different, and better--I lost my fear of dangerous machinery, the day went much faster, and I might have even gotten a little raise. And the people were cooler.

The following spring, I got my own mow crew. I thought I was doing pretty well--less than a year, I went from low-man to bossing people around...and I think I did pretty well. I took to the regularity of mowing, although I still hated the drudgery of doing the same thing every time, and thus got to know a large part of the city by taking alternate routes to the various jobsites. I coulda been a cabbie.

Five years later, we got an employee named Ed. Ed was about forty years old, gray where he wasn't bald, smelled bad, and talked about "pussy" and "weed" in a way I thought was the domain of people even younger than ME (I think I was 24 at the time). But for Ed, I might still be there--because when I looked at Ed, I saw me, 20 years from now, taking orders from some longhaired punk and not being real sure where all the years before had gone.

And, hey, I was 24 in 1996--the world was my oyster, yo. TLJO and I made plans--floating the Mississippi (foiled by the floods and our giant-ass LSD habit), walk the Continental Divide, etc.. Stuff MY dad dreamed of doing, and I think everyone does (Twin B and the Appalachian Trail, for instance)...but instead, I gave my notice and my reasons, and the Man talked me out of it.

The company was in dire need of technical support at the time--schedules were being printed off a spreadsheet at the time, but billing was still being done by hand, and that looked pretty bad to the bigger contracts we were getting. So in 1996, I sold out.

Two years later, I had a company owned car, a company owned computer, life insurance, a HOUSE, two company credit cards, and an ulcer.

Two years after THAT, I had health insurance, credit card debt, and a bleeding ulcer.

And six years after that, I'm here.

So, add it up--fifteen years. And you know what I got?

"Well, thanks!"

Yup. No watch, no fucking bonus, no nothin'. Don't let the door...sayonara, sucka. ..

Beh.

Merry Holidays

2005-12-27T12:22:00.000-08:00

tgiving17, originally uploaded by houdinisblind.

From the Minuard Foundation.

Flock of Seagulls 1: Housewarming

2005-11-04T09:06:00.000-08:00

Sometime in 94 or 95, Chuck had moved into an apartment fairly close to my place in Crackville, and began having regular parties. The first party was a housewarming party, since he'd lost most of his household stuff when he moved out of his ex-girlfriend's place. I dutifully brought some kind of kitchen implement, but it appeared that most people were just there to drink. Which was fine, I guess. Chuck didn't seem to care.

Over the course of the evening, I got to meet all sorts of people. Edless, of course, was right in the middle of everything, as were various current and former skinhead guys, including a crazy dude named Ben, fresh out of the Marines, and Dusty and John M, who were not. There were also twenty or thirty people from Cox Cable, where Chuck worked, and it seemed like fifty people of the hipster/rockabilly crowd. Yes, it was a Big Party, but it didn't really get started until Terry showed up.

Now, I've talked about Terry before, over on Midian, but it was a while back. Terry was a big, loud guy who sold cable television door to door with Chuck. Terry was quite a bit older than us, but nevertheless managed to fit in because he was utterly crazy. In this case, he walked in the door, located Chuck, and handed him a flyer. "I stuck about 500 of these on cars down on 10th Street," he said, grabbing a bottle of rum out of someone's hand, "they'll probably start showing up after the strippers leave at 2am."

Chuck handed me the flyer. The top of it said "PARTY!" in big black letters, and below that was a grainy picture of a topless girl. Below, various phrases caught my eye: "oil wrestling," "naked chicks," "free keg." And Chuck's address.

Yes, it was utterly over the top. Surely he wouldn't do that, right? Right! He agreed that it was all a joke, fished for compliments about the flyer, and rummaged in the fridge for one of my beers. The flyer was forgotten.

Sometime after one AM, the party thinned out. The remaining revelers were snoozing or policing the apartment, as I recall, when the doorbell rang. Two rather scruffy looking guys stood outside:

"Hey, they a party off in here?"

"Huh?"

"We got a flyer, man. Where all the women at?"

"What? Let me see that. Where the fuck did you get this?"

"Down on 10th Street, man! Now come on, where's the party? Where's the oil rasslin?"

"Look, there's no fucking party. There's no girls here."

"What? Sure looks like a party!"

"The party's over. Just go home."

"No girls?"

"No girls."

"I see why. You so mean, you ran 'em all off!"

"Ha ha, very funny."

"All right, man, better luck next time."

MLWS: Against My Better Judggment

2005-10-25T21:03:00.000-07:00

I stole a song that reminds me so strongly of my manchildhood (that period between age 22 and 26 or so) that I had to tell you guys about it. I don't know how long it will last, or what form it's going to take, precisely, but it's another part of my life that I haven't really talked about...

GG and Rebecca, you know some of these people. Keep it to yourself, although feel free to correct me via email if you feel I'm getting something wrong.

Sometime after the giant acid retailing days of the early nineties, and after the brief social remission I had as a result, I somehow hooked up with a couple of old friends from my second go-round with college. We had drifted apart after I left college the second time, mostly because they didn't approve of drugs and I didn't approve of gun running...which sounds kind of melodromatic, but it's the truth. Although I didn't really have any problem with gun-running morally, you understand, I just didn't feel comfortable storing crates of contraband in my rather limited closet space. I prefered wafers and doused papers to crates and gun oil, in other words. Inconvenient.

Anyway, they were my friends, and while I'm not sure how we jumped the gap between "friends" and "hanging out regularly again," I'm pretty sure it wasn't my fault.

There was a lot of deep background that I could expound upon, if I felt like giving you the best foundation in My History, but this isn't a history blog, it's a story blog, so I'll just pick it up...sheesh...what was the first memorable story?

Ah, jeez. The first memorable story...no, it's not memorable, at least not for you. For me, well, let's see:

Edless was a big guy, smart, but with a short temper and a broad waistline, which seemed at odds with his abundant energy and professed lifestyle...I wasn't really sure if I liked him or not, but he sort of came as a package (one of those annoying heat-sealed-plastic packages that takes a boxcutter to get into) with another friend of mine, Chuck. Keeping it simple, Chuck and I had met the previous semester because he was doing a paper on Satanism in Oklahoma....and...well, we became friends. Not due to Satanism, you understand (although lots of Evil Dead movies and whiskey were involved), but due...well, yes, perhaps it was whiskey. Anyway, by the end of 1995 I was a regular invitee to some of Chuck's parties.

It soon became apparent to me that Chuck had a lot of rather colorful friends. Now, I'd pretty well plumbed the depths of colorful people as far as punks, acidheads, hippies, hipsters, homos and hoodlums is concerned, but I found in Chuck's crew a gang of people who seemed...as energetic, as happy, and as dissolute as my own crew. The difference was their...creed, you might call it. Most of the specific group I want to talk about were skinheads of various sorts--I want to be clear that Chuck's friends were not predominately skinheads, but rather the group that I'm talking about was primarily skins.

Eh, I know this is rather disjointed, but I've been working my way up to telling these stories for quite some time. Personally, I'm not one for joining any group, much less one that requires a haircut and a uniform...

But tomorrow, or sometime soon, I'll tell you drunken stories.

Yes, feel free to jump the gun and start a comment thread about consorting with fascists and such. I'll be here, and I have a much bigger font than you. Sucka.

Rudy Jones: Predatory Mites

2005-10-07T15:54:00.000-07:00

Since I can't seem to Google any references to Rudy on my own fucking blog, I'm hoping I don't tell the same story again. For those of you who weren't reading (assuming anyone still IS reading), Rudy was a chemical applicator for me several years ago. He's absolutely wacko, but quite charming in his own way.

Now, Rudy was really superhuman when it came to a lot of things. He sprayed more turf than I've ever seen anyone spray, ate hugely (my boss once followed him down May, and watched him stop at six fast food restaurants in the span of half an hour), and had an optimism about life and his place in it that I haven't seen matched anywhere outside of the White House.

But Rudy had weaknesses. Gurls, as you're all aware, could wrap him around their cruel talons with a smile. The sight of his own blood caused him to shut down for a week. And he had a fear of the microscopic that bordered on supernatural obsession.

Rudy believed to the core of his being that there were bugs that lived in and under his skin. These bugs came and went periodically, and made their presence known by boils or eruptions on his skin. To me, these looked like quarter-sized scabs, but to Rudy, they were tiny parasites, or monsters. He regaled me with earnest tales of cutting them open to try and dig out the little critter inside, with varying results. "Normally I get 'em," he said, "but sometimes they just move."

Once I saw what Rudy was using to dig around (in his own flesh, let's be clear on this), I was sure that the problem wasn't anything other than a very bad skin condition (brought on by not fucking bathing for weeks on end) complicated with unclean "surgical tools." The original tool was an X-acto knife, which was crusted with matter and secreted in the glove box of his work truck, but later he switched to a swiss army knife the company handed out as gifts one Christmas. Sometimes, when his flesh was very tender, he'd dig into his face with a toothpick.

Gross, huh? Where did these bugs COME from, you ask?

Off trees. Cedar trees, specifically.

See, his face was bad, but not truly horrifying, until the second winter he was living in his car. Previous to this, he'd taken a shower pretty regularly (although not exactly frequently), but upon losing his apartment and moving back into the MMRU, the whole hygiene thing just fell apart for him. Further complicating this was the fact that he spent most nights in a crappy little restaurant very close to my house, which had both off track betting and the dubious patronage of Jamelle Holloway.

(As an aside, will someone please tell me I'm not an old coot because I know the name Jamelle Holloway?)

Thus, he spent most evenings that fall and winter hunkered over a draw beer and a plate of greasy steak, eyeing the big screens and the firm buttocks of the serving staff, who soon learned they made a lot of money if they'd just shut up and smile.

But as time wore on, his face became a serious problem. It got bad enough that children (and not a few housewives) were scared of him, and I began urging him to see a doctor, or barring that, start bathing nightly.

"Aw, man, them doctors don't know nothin'! I know what it is already!"

"What, then?"

"Predatory mites! They jumped off them cedar trees we put in a few months back, and I been trying to get the little suckers out of my face for the longest time!"

He went on to tell me that it's a well known fact that predatory mites get on people all the time, and while they rarely do serious injure to people, they're also hard to get rid of. Rudy felt that the only way to really get them to leave was to keep their little entry wounds open, so they could crawl out on their own. Thus, the X-acto knife in the truck, so he could work on them during lunch.

This went on for several months, but as his face worsened, his outlook worsened, so by springtime (that is, after his wrongful arrest for DUI, which is another story), we forced him to visit a doctor.

Of course, we paid for it, and had to pitch it to him in terms of our own peace of mind, but he did go. The doctor wrote him a prescription for an antibiotic, and told him to start washing his fucking face already.

But Rudy wasn't convinced. "Aw, man, them doctors don't know what they're talking about. It was one of them minimum wage doctors, anyway. He never even heard of predatory mites!"

Yowza. What An Angry Bastard I Was

2005-09-27T19:19:00.000-07:00

I was sitting here diggin' on this cold, slippery twelve pack of mass-brewed beer and looking back through the archives of this thing to see what exactly I could write about Rudy Jones that I haven't already, and came up with this post. The gist:

Get Your Own Blog

I can't say that I love you, kids. At least some of you. I can't say that I care too much about you, either--not because I feel like I'm some sort of blogstar or whatever, but just because I've emptied out my compassion and patience reservoirs over the last few months, for good and bad reasons...but really, sirs and ladies, what the fucking holy Jesus Christ on a stick do I owe any of you, at least w/r/t this blog? Not a damn thing, other than my own self imposed madness concerning telling you stories about my own life.

So, to get to the specifics, fuck you. Fuck you, you idiots that can't imagine anything beyond your next paycheck. Fuck you, you bitches who can't understand anything beyond the driving of an SUV from work, to Wal Mart, and home. Fuck you, you dipshits who don't understand that it's only yours inasmuch as you bought it and there are more important ties in the real world than a goddamn bill of sale, or treaty. There are things that supersede pens and paper and the agreements that treacherous bastards in Washington think are best. It's nothing==The feel of earth in your hands, the feeling of having dirt on your hands, and knowing it's your soil, your land, your life....

The IRA. Steinbeck, and anarchists and labor organizers and the motherfuckerst that truly understand what it takes to live a life on this planet, a life without getting kicked in the face by The Man, a life without getting bled dry by some asshole on welfare...

OK, I can ramble for days about what is good....but I've got someone already here to help load, and I've got another surprise visitor who doesn't know he's being suckered into helping load, so I must go and snaggle my snares. Extra good, since I've now found a second G and T that needed to be made.

Sigh...ah well, I don't know who's still checking this thing now, but I'm sure you've been disappointed recently. There's more in there, but...well, the stuff on the top is just excuses, and you've got to have a prybar and a snorkel, or be willing to sleep with me, to get at much of what's below that recently.

Perhaps it's becoming all drab and mundane--perhaps I should start lying, or rather, introducing some fiction into things. But you know me now, so I'd have to surreptitiously start another one, and develop a following over THERE (which I'm not sure the writing would be enough to pull...).

Shit. Well, I can't seem to find ANY of the RQJIII stuff, so I'm going to let this post do for now, and think about something easy. I think I have a couple that I can edit and throw up real quick...

Senate Confirmation Hearings Drinking Game

2005-09-14T07:27:00.000-07:00

Democrats:

Drink when any of your senators invokes Katrina.
Drink when any of your senators mentions "privacy," twice if it's privacy other than women's privacy. Three times if the word "abortion" is actually used.
Drink when Ted Kennedy plainly wants you to forget he was born in the same circumstances as Dubya.
Drink when Joe Biden argues with Roberts. Twice when he argues with Specter.

Republicans:

Drink when any of your senators invokes 9/11.
Drink when any of your senators mentions "judicial activism," or "legislating from the bench."
Drink whenever John Roberts quotes a subsection of a law.
Drink whenever Roberts refuses to answer a question.

EVERYONE!:

Drink whenever anyone says "with all due respect" or "my esteemed colleague" or "let the record show."
Drink whenever Specter has to call anyone down. Twice if it's justified.
Drink whenever there is obvious personal political campaigning.
Drink when anyone uses Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a reason to demand an answer, or refuse to give an answer. Twice if she's invoked two times in the same exchange.

Fire Conclave

2005-09-10T15:19:00.000-07:00

Many of you know that I was invited to be part of NY's own 1337 for this year's Fire Conclave. Many of you don't.

Here is a picture of the Fire Conclave at Burning Man 2004. I think there are about 500 people who are in it, all fire performers--poi spinners, breathers, staff/double staff, firesword, whatever. They do about half an hour's worth of performance before the burn, then the stage is cleared and the Man get torched.

The people at the front of the picture? Add about 34 thousand to them, and you'll have an idea of the size of the crowd. It's fucking awesome.

Now, believe it or not, I'm incredibly shy by nature. If I don't know you, I won't speak to you unless you ask me a direct question. And public speaking? Fageddaboudit!

So last year, when Burnzie asked me to be part of the Conclave, I looked at her like she was nuts.

This year, she got me early, and with the flanking attack of our own Oubliette, I agreed to perform. Immediately afterward, my stomach began to cramp.

As the weeks flew by, more info came my way: Conclave was an umbrella under which various groups performed, directed by someone in the Burning Man organization. Last year, the Org had required all performers to learn a specific routine, which as you can imagine, judging from the...individuality...of anyone who plays with fire for long periods of time, didn't go over very well. Unfortunately the brunt of the whining fell on the ears of the group leaders, instead of the Org, where it belonged. Anyway, I was too drunk to see the Conclave last year anyway.

This year, the Org kind of learned from their past "mistake." They required each group to do "something" pertaining to the theme, but didn't require anything specific. The result was 1337 Presents: Alice In Wonderland.

Now, naturally, I'm a fit for the Mad Hatter, not least because I've got the hat. But someone else (Bryce?) with a hell of a lot more seniority (that is, SOME) than me wanted that position, and furthermore pointed out that as a fire BREATHER, I should be the Jabberwock, a fire breathing dragon sort of thing. Which wasn't precisely Alice In Wonderland, but I would have been happy playing a plastic turd for this one.

The night before, I met Stacycats (hi, Stacycats!), who as it happens was also performing in 1337 the next day, and we made a night of it, actually watching the sun come up with members of Image Node.

Now, sleeping during the day is pretty much impossible, so I at least was pretty well strung out by the time we were to gather at Burnzie's place to prep and get laminates (that's right, I had ACCESS!). It was there the story really begins.

When we arrived at the meeting place, I was pleased to note that I'd met almost all of the performers before, in some capacity or another. Burnzie did her normal fine job of orienting everyone and motivating or calming certain performers (I was obviously in the latter category)...and then it was time to wait.

We waited forever, it seems like. People went away, came back. People showed up, were greeted, and began to wait. Finally our Rabbit and Alice showed up. Rabbit was nonplussed to find that my entire Jabberwock costume consisted of a pair of leather pants and vest (which looked GOOD, dammit!), so we began sorting out how to go about getting a winged effect. Ultimately, we decided he would stand behind me as I was breathing, spinning his short staves in a sort of winglike manner. Fuck it, it was dark, the crowd was all on drugs anyway...and nobody was going to be able to see "wings" behind a big ball of fire anyway.

The walk out to the site beautiful. The sun had just set, the temperature was perfect, and I was walking with a crew of professional fire people to do a show in front of a stadium sized crowd. I was reminded of the scene at the beginning of Reservoir Dogs, and actually began to hum the song they were playing, until I realized I was actually humming the Blues Brothers theme, and Burnzie asked everyone if anyone had to pee. People cheered us as we walked by, bristling with wick and dressed to the nines.

We were greeted at the circle by about a hundred firefighters in full yellow gear, one of whom checked our laminates before allowing us to proceed. I started to worry again, briefly, but this time for my own safety, and the safety of others around me. Did I know what I was doing? Shit, no. I mean, I knew what I was doing, but I had no idea how far away from the crowd I needed to be, or how the wind was going to affect my fireballs.

Stacycats did a great deal to calm me during the next few minutes, as we got to our fuel dump and began discussing what was going to happen. The group was divided into three subgroups. There were 13 performers, 7 safeties, and two auxiliary personnel (Twin C as Helmsman/radio man and Brother Bacon as photographer/secondary safety). It's the safeties job to put you out if you catch on fire. It's their job to light your shit up when you're ready to burn, and basically be your back in case of emergency. I had never worked with a safety, but they're absolutely critical in a big event like this.

To explain further, the fuel dump is a big can that contains all the smaller cans of fuel the performers will use during the performance. It's obviously very dangerous to have open flame near the fuel dump. Our photographer and all around badass Brother Bacon took some group shots, and we began to sort out the performance.

In theory, Alice would come out and spin for a second, then "go down the rabbit hole" by means of a kind of spinning movement. At this point the Rabbit would come out, complete with fire ears, and interact with her somehow--this was left to the performers. Then the Card Army would come out, marching in step and spinning the same routine, very professional looking. Then the Queen of Hearts (Burnzie, who was awesome) joined the crew, berating the cards and hassling Alice.

At this point, I was to begin doing my thing somewhere close to her, but preferably upwind. Rabbit would then come behind me, I would lift my torch, and he would touch off his staves from that, begin spinning, and making wings. That would be the end of the first set, once we all "spun out."

Now, more waiting. Twin C had the radio, and was calling out periodic admonitions and answering five questions a minute. Other groups all around began practicing, shouting and moving about in the near darkness. Nobody was lit. It was hard to tell where we were supposed to be. I could see the crowd growing and hear them getting louder, and there was nothing for me to do but wait, and watch the people on stilts next to us practice their fire staves. I began to wonder what I was doing there. Burnzie came up behind me and touched my arm. "Hey, thanks for coming out. We're going to be awesome." Gratitude welled up in my black little heart, followed swiftly by confidence (or at least bravado).

Twin C began a kind of countdown--"20 minutes!" "10 minutes! First crew should start soaking!" "Two minutes!"

"Shitshitshitshit," I thought, "it's too late to back out now. I'm trapped-better dazzle them before they think about eating me alive." I started lighting wicks.

First Dorothy, then the Rabbit came up. I lit his ears, and off they went. The Card Army marched by, then Burnzie. I spun my torch a couple of times behind the group, checked my fuel, and started slowly walking towards the front.

At that moment, the Rabbit came bursting into my field of view, yelling "safety! safety! someone put me out!" He then pitched himself face first (it appeared) onto the ground practically at my feet. Safeties swarmed him, but I couldn't see much other than that his head had a lot more fire than I'd anticipated on it.

Then it was my turn. I couldn't look back, or help, I had to hurry away, in fact, and pretend like nothing was happening. I did, and I don't think I was more than a second behind my schedule.

I blew a big gout, and didn't get much response. I walked a little closer, and did it again. Shit, I was bombing. Hopefully they were looking at the Rabbit behind me. I got a little closer, took another swig out of the bottle. I took another step to the crowd, which I could barely see, and blew off another one.

Now, the thing about firebreathing in darkness is that you lose all your night vision the instant you look at the fire, which you can't help but do. And when you're performing in something like this, you can't really watch where it's going, either, so you're effectively performing blind, except for about one second between blasts to gauge where you are. I'd been doing this fairly successfully, and edging my way closer to the crowd.

Suddenly, I heard Rabbit behind me, and held up my torch for him to light off. When I did, my vision came back-and less than three feet away from me sat the first row of people. Since they were sitting down, I didn't see them silhouetted against the art cars and sky, and wasn't in danger of catching them on fire, but I got oil on half a dozen of them or more.

I couldn't even say I'm sorry to them, cause my mouth was full of fuel.

We finished, backed off, and watched another group do their thing.

The rest of it went without a hitch--I aspirated a bit of fuel towards the end of "free spin," the last 10 minutes, but pretty soon we were being hustled off and sat down in the front fucking row, a hundred fifty feet away from the Man.

Which promptly went up in fire and fireworks. I hugged Stacy, and Brother Bacon, and Burnzie and pretty much anyone else I could get my hands on, and sat watching the dust devils dance out of the fire.

Out

2005-08-30T20:10:00.000-07:00

gonetobm, originally uploaded by houdinisblind.

I won't have time to update this again, although I'll probably post something or other over on Midian before I leave.

Hope you guys all have a good weekend. I'll let you know when I get back.

Love,
Jefe

Gwen 8: Natalie

2005-08-19T10:00:00.000-07:00

It's time I backtrack a bit and tell you about Natalie.

She was a friend of Jamie's, and resided in Edmond (an hour's drive from Norman, half an hour from my new place in OKC) with a more-or-less punk rock crew of musicians and computer geeks. I'd met her and become friends with her during several small parties at Jamie's place, and by springtime she and I were hanging out regularly.

And hanging out was the operative term--she didn't appear to be attracted to me, and she wasn't exactly the type of girl I went for anyway; she was short and broad shouldered, with a bright red mohawk.

But there was something between us--dense as I am, I didn't notice it, even when she started acting weird (or getting quiet) whenever I talked about Gwen. It didn't occur to me that I wanted to kiss her until after she started seeing some idiot punker named Leslie, and I started getting little pangs of jealousy, despite the fact that I liked hanging out with him.

To complicate matters even FURTHER, Natalie worked with a cute little hippie chick named Becky. Becky had a crazy boyfriend named Alan, who was often out of town, and during those times Becky and Nat would hang out quite a bit.

So by the time I moved into that cavernous apartment across the street from work, I had a full-fledged crisis on my hands. Gwen had sort of slid to back of my mind, replaced with wondering a) how I was going to reconcile my previous ideas of attractiveness with the obvious attraction I felt for both linebacker-shaped Nat and lithe little Becky, and b) whether either one of them was interested in fooling around.

Then Becky mentioned in a conversation that Alan had beat up some dude who'd been "making time with her," so I dropped that idea. Natalie...well, before I had to do much hard thinking about whether I wanted to risk a friendship for what would have been my second piece of ass ever, Gwen called me.

I was a popular boy, then--I'd come out of the comatose state I'd been in, dropped ten pounds of fat, added ten pounds of muscle and five pounds of tan, and had money in my pocket. I was nineteen and supporting myself, reading, running a popular bulletin board (still only at night), and meeting for the first time people who didn't know or give a shit about my past. They were heady times.

But Gwen...we made a date for her to visit my place, which she did. I showed her the parts of the house Jim hadn't already fucked up (which at this early time was mostly his bedroom), including the fireplace, balcony, and closets. She really appeared to like the closets, for some reason, and before I knew what was going on, we were making out.

Now, boys and girls, in order to get through this with me, you'll have to think like you're in my position. Me making out with this girl (at that time the third girl I'd ever even had much physical contact with, period) was a lot like Elwood Blues making out with Lucy Liu. It's just funny, unless you're Lucy Liu, I imagine.

Anyway, it was a heavy session of petting, but pretty quickly she had to go and return her father's car. She was back at home (or still at home), but had to watch herself pretty carefully before some sort of post-high school science trip to Louisiana. There would be more of that discussed later, with her little head on my chest, her fingers tracing the midline of my belly...downward.

But as it happened, I didn't see her again for a couple weeks. Work was, for all its rejuvenating properties, a major drag on my social life--and in these days before cellphones, if I wasn't home (ie, if I was out with Natalie or Becky), I couldn't be reached. Shit, come to think of it, these were days before caller ID, at least for broke-ass lawn boys like me.

Eventually she came to the apartment again, on a Saturday morning, and essentially dragged me straight to my closet. She grabbed my long hair and pulled me down to the floor, where we did horizontally what we'd only done on our feet before. Soon both of us were sweating, and clothing began to come off. She became more shy the fewer clothes she had on, and eventually broke off a marathon kiss (which I was using to attempt to distract her from my inability (which continues to this day) to get her bra unhooked) to complain that it was "too bright in here."

Which it was. My closet actually had a window in it, and the June Oklahoma sun was enthusiastically beaming through it, effectively making the closet into a sauna.

I broached the topic of my "bed," which still consisted of a set of twin sheets stretched out on the floor in the next room...but she said she preferred Jim's closet. Which was pitch black.

[and, for those of you who know Jim, completely clean--it was only later that the funk started creeping from his bed, eventually to take over the entire upper floor. Well, almost.]

So the second girl I ever slept with I didn't actually see. The second girl ever to go down on me, I couldn't watch. It was weird--like fucking with a blindfold on, which is NOT something two novices should be trying to do, especially given her...limited experience. It hurt her, even when we tried slowly and gently, but she wouldn't let me go until it was over. For me, it seemed like everything I did was wrong--when I wasn't putting an elbow on her forearm, I was pinning her head to the floor by her lustrous black hair with my palm. Lips met teeth because we couldn't judge distance very well, and I'm sure her little ass was red from carpet fiber. I know my knees were.

Later, after dark, she consented to move from Jim's closet to my bed, where we talked and touched one another in a cautious mannter. I began to realize we didn't have anything in common at all, except a mutual lust which had been merely stunned by the difficulty we'd just experienced. Thus, even then, love was a bittersweet experience.

Gwen 7: Dropping Out

2005-08-10T10:50:00.000-07:00

As I think I've told you before, somewhere, I decided to quit college in the spring of that year. I'd been talking to Beverly, and she had taken my situation to heart and done some looking around for me. This "looking" involved calling in a favor from one of the other businesses on the court in which her office was located, a landscaping company that owed her money.

Yes, I got this job in some sort of screwball financial nepotism deal. And given how little The Man likes to do things other people say, I'm quite sure he did his best in the first couple of weeks to get me to quit. That's in retrospect, of course. At the time I was too naive to understand that--I'd left school thinking that working for a living was going to be one of the hardest things one could do, so it never occurred to me that it might be easier getting a job as a car washer or something. Further, I don't think he appreciated how much of a corner I was backed into--the people at OU had said some pretty shitty things to me before I left, so I was determined to prove them wrong...

Anyway, I came up and interviewed for the job in April (actually, the day I turned 19), and was hired on the spot for a position starting a month away. I went back to Beverly's office and told her the good news. She said, "OK, so you've got a job. You have a place to stay?" Of course not.

"Well, let's see. Jim! Come in here, son!" In came the infamous Jim, the first time I ever laid eyes on that crazy son of a bitch. Fifteen minutes later we were driving around looking for an apartment together. Most places had better sense than to rent to us, but at the place directly across the street, the leasing manager had some weird repressed homo-erotic fixation on ponytails, so we squeezed through the leasing process and reported back to the woman I was coming to call "Mom" more and more easily.

And the dynamic was established for my relationship with Jim right there: Jim talks, I correct or append if necessary. In this case, it worked out pretty well for me because the first thing she said was "OK, you have an apartment. Do you have any money?"

The answer, of course, was "hell no." That's why I got a job...but she loaned us $300 buck each and sent us out to buy housewares.

A few days before the end of the semester, Jim rode to Norman to help me move my shit. Everything I owned fit in the back seat of my car. I didn't even use the trunk.

We moved into a HUGE condo in a pretty ratty apartment complex. Two bed, two bath, patio, fireplace, balcony. Bigger (or maybe as big) as my parents' house. And we couldn't fill it.

I remember spreading a fitted sheet on my bedroom floor and turning out the lights. The moon was full and coming through the vertical blinds that covered the balcony glass, and I laid there for an hour or so looking at the slashes of light on the floor. It was one of the first times I worried about whether I could actually do something. There was nobody there to pick me up, really--no school administrator/scholarship director to pull rank on college bureaucrats, no-one I could borrow money from if something bad happened, and definitely no-one I could talk to about it. This was probably the night of my first existential awakening, and it was bittersweet.

The next day I walked to work for the first time. It kicked my fucking ass. It kicked my ass for the next two weeks, til I finally crashed with the worst sunburn you've ever seen. After two days out sick, I was back at it. We were worked so hard the guy who was in charge of me quit due to the stress, so I spent a couple days doing jobs by myself. After a month, things were looking up. I had lost 15 pounds, but I was gaining it back as muscle, and felt some confidence that maybe I was strong enough to do this after all.

Gwen 6: Aftermath

2005-07-27T13:44:00.000-07:00

The next day, Ted appeared with Bev and a few geeks from the boards, and soon we were all traipsing around the park in drag...er...costume. I had the crossbow slung across my back, and Ted had some kind of big sword, while Bev was dressed as some sort of gypsy fortuneteller and the others were dressed as, well, other geeks. Dee was nowhere around. Everyone took care not to mention it.

Ted didn't really have much to say around the others, but eventually he concocted a mission to get away and told me the juicy bits. He'd gone to meet Gwen, who in retrospect was probably already under suspicion from her father, and somehow old Dad had discovered the situation (whether it was in flagrante delicto or not, I never knew). This resulted in Dad making the phone call to Ted's wife, which allowed me to dodge a very serious bullet w/r/t Ted's wife. Which he probably deserved, albeit with some other, similarly guilty person playing the role of cuckolder.

The upshot was that Dee had gone absolutely emotional batshit on him when he slunk in the door at 1am, which isn't surprising or unreasonable. They'd stayed up all night talking and fighting, and at the end they agreed to stay married if he promised never to speak with Gwen again. Thus, he had to make The Phone Call, no doubt with Dee looking on, after no sleep, and with the rest of my sewing still to do.

"But," he said cheerfully, "it's over with now. We can move on!"

"Great," I thought. "you'd have married her first, huh?"

The rest of the day I spent talking to Bev. She was quite a character, and just naturally assumed a mothering role over everyone, Ted included. We talked a lot about my incipient departure from college, and she was quite encouraging about it, which was in direct opposition to everything I'd heard from everyone else. I decided I liked her.

Around sunset, we split up. I promised Ted I'd call, and never did. Upon my arrival in my dorm room, my phone was ringing. It was Gwen, and I wasn't shocked to hear her crying.

The conversation was the first I'd had with her that was unmarred by hangups, hurried whispers, or other discouragements. Unfortunately, it wasn't a happy conversation. Her father was kicking her out of the house, for "destroying the honor of her family." No shit, that's exactly the words she used. Her mother was trying to intervene, Gwen said, but for the time being she was stuck on a pay phone at the Braum's in which we'd met a couple of months before. I did my best to reassure her that things would be OK, and that her father was being unreasonable but would probably calm down.

"If he doesn't," she sniffled, "what am I going to do? I don't have any place to go!"

"You can stay here, in my dorm room," I replied, without a second thought. She brightened up some.

"Really?"

"Yeah, no problem. I can hide you here, and when I leave here, you're welcome to stay wherever I wind up."

"But...you have a girlfriend!"

"True, but she's just going to have to understand the situation," I said, thinking to myself that Mary understanding why I was hiding an incredibly beautiful seventeen year old girl in a dorm room with one bed was about as likely as my mother understanding my reasons for leaving school.

She cried a bit more, but the worst appeared to be over. She seemed mollified that she had some place to go, and between sniffles she began to ask little silly questions about where we'd run off to and how we'd live. I didn't pay too much attention, but in retrospect I realize that what we were doing, despite the gravity of her current situation, was flirting. What the hell, I thought, I hadn't planned on taking Mary with me anyway.

The next day I got a call from Gwen, telling me she was back at home, and while her father wasn't speaking to her, it looked like she was at least going to graduate from high school with her parents in attendance. We chatted amiably for a while, and she extracted a promise from me that I would call her once I got set up in a new apartment.

Gwen 5: The phone rang.

2005-07-22T06:20:00.000-07:00

Dee answered it. It was Gwen's father, very angry. I stuck around long enough to hear something that sounded a lot like "why you fuck my daughter?" before I beat a hasty retreat to my dorm room. I put the board up and didn't answer any sysop pages.

Gwen 4: Med Faire

2005-07-18T08:06:00.000-07:00

The weeks after finding out about this situation were very hectic ones for me. I was engaged in dropping out of OU, finding a job (not to mention a place to live), and generally preparing for a new life in a new city. I was also juggling a girlfriend, Midian, and the love life of three other people.

On the last bit, I would get this sequence of phone calls about three times a week:

Gwen: "Oh, Jeff, I was with Ted again last night and he was so wonderful! But I feel really bad about Dee, because she's really sweet and I know it would just kill her if she found out! When am I going to see you again?"

Ted: "Dude, Gwen is so fucking hot! You have no IDEA what I did with her last night! She's fucking crazy, man!"

Dee: "Jeff, why is my husband cheating on me [bursts into tears]?"

The first two were pretty stable. The last, from Dee, evolved from "IS my husband" to "WHY IS my husband," then proceeded through the tears to "is it because I'm ugly?" to "he MADE me this way!"

While all this was going on, I was steadily growing more fond of Beverly and her board, Dreamscape. I also began chatting with one of her sons, who is about a year older than me, and who had quite a bit of experience on obsolete BBS systems in the Tulsa area. He was quite a character, and occasionally kept me up for more than an hour in the dead of night, tapping at the keyboard, talking about crazy shit. His name? You can call him "Minuard."

All of this persisted for a period of a month or six weeks--I was so busy it's hard to guess. In early April, though, Ted began to pester me about the Medieval Faire, which takes (took) place at a local park, and was something I had never really considered visiting. That specific park was one we used to play capture the flag in, some nights, and other nights we used it as a destination for walking and quiet talking about how we were going to live our lives. Those nights were almost too sentimental and idealistic for me to write about here, especially now, but suffice to say I wasn't too keen on My Park being overrun by crystal healing hippies and fat dudes with fake swords.

But, as usual, Ted talked me into it. On the afternoon before the Faire began, I cut class and headed up to his place to begin making my costume. This was a big deal, and we spent a lot of the afternoon wandering fabric stores and talking about my impending move into the city. Finally, we returned to his place and began cutting and sewing. Ted already had his costume, which he promptly dressed in so I could see what I would be walking around with, complete with shoulder scabbard for a big-ass sword. I was to wear a crossbow, a real crossbow that meant BUSINESS, and was meaner looking than all of my friends combined. The draw on it was too heavy for me to pull, which was OK because he didn't have any intention of giving me anything to put in it, anyway.

By 9:30, we had most of it hashed out, and Dee was fixing the three of us dinner, humming happily away as her husband sewed in the next room [for what it's worth, I can't sew. I can't even comprehend how a sewing machine works--you know how some people can't balance a checkbook, or can't do fractions? I understand those people a lot more now that I've experienced my own sort of mental blind spot].

We had just finished dinner, and Ted had just made Turkish coffee, when his pager went off. Instantly, Dee's face became closed and unhappy, and Ted practically leaped to the telephone--in the bedroom. A minute later, he returned with a hard look for his wife, a curt "I've got to go fix a printer," and a warning glance at me.

"What about this costume, man? When will you be back?"

"I don't know when I'll be back. I'll finish it for you tomorrow morning, before we come down for the Faire. Just hang around, though, I shouldn't be too long."

So Dee and I sat, and waited. I remember Ted combing his thick brown hair before he left, in the hallway mirror. The whole thing had taken less than 10 minutes. Dee stared at me. I tried to make conversation, but everything I said seemed to make her want to cry even more. I don't do well with women crying, even now--and back then, at age 18, I was substantially less prepared to deal. So we sat. I stared at her, when she wasn't looking, and counted the books in the bookcase when she was. The television babbled in the next room.

An hour passed, and Dee got up to clear the table. I asked carefully if she wanted help, she just looked at me. I moved out of her way. She cleared the table, then went to the living room and lit a cigarette. I followed, and sat on the couch.

After a second, she took a giant drag off of the smoke and turned to face me. I'd never seen a face like that before--full of warring emotions: love, hate, and betrayal. Her eyes vacillated between cold and hard, soft and tragic, and lost and tearful and lonely. She sat on the couch, beside me. I moved, looking around the room for a place to sit. She caught my hand, and wouldn't let me go, even when I said "I should get home." We sat on the couch, with her hand holding mine, as she stared into my eyes. "Don't go," she said, and leaned forward to kiss me.

Gwen 3: Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch

2005-07-13T12:16:00.000-07:00

Ted and I were getting along famously. I'd met his wife, Dee, who had cooked a rather miserable meal for us, and seemed quite happy to have someone to talk to. She was plainly very lonely, and very, very pregnant.

Ted, for his part, talked endlessly about RPG's and SCA events, and their entire house was decorated in a combination of her gypsy/crystal healing/unicorn stuff and his...axes.

Yes, boys and girls, Ted collected sharp things. Morning stars, flails, 12 or 15 examples of four different types of swords, a crossbow, a couple of compound bows, and all manner of knives, hatchets, and ugly looking pointy things. Most of the house was crammed with this stuff, and if I'd really been into this I'm quite sure I could have spent the rest of the year in there, fiddling happily with crossbow bolts and whetstone and the like. I wasn't that into it, though, but it was hard to keep Ted's enthusiasm for things medieval from exciting you in turn.

I took to visiting them fairly frequently, and making the occasional foray over to Jamie's place to hang with the Rome crowd, which was really more my type (and age) anyway. But I enjoyed being with everyone, even when Dee and Ted would get into arguments while I was hanging around. She seemed like the dishrag type, and I noticed he took to bullying her as I got to know them better. I didn't like that, but I also didn't think it was any of my business.

The BBS was going pretty well--I was getting ten or fifteen visitors in a night, and people were actually beginning to call me on the phone like normal humans. My old roommate had flunked out of school, and taken Maryann with him. My new roommate had lasted about 2 weeks, then fled, so I was left with the Uhura-dude in the next room. He pretty much kept to himself, so for the spring semester I had the run of my room.

One of the people I met via the BBS was an older woman I instantly liked, and counted as half-friend and half-mother figure. Her name was Beverly, an after a couple of weeks of talking, she decided she enjoyed the BBS scene enough that she wanted to set up one of her own. My first tech support job, I guess. We did it over the phone, or actually over my roommate's phone, so I could help with her machine from mine.

Shit, I can't remember what hers was called, but there was a genuine blossoming of WWIV boards going for several months there. Ted set up House of Ill Repute 2, which never really took off, I had Midian, Beverly had hers (DREAMSCAPE! That's it!), and some other dweeb started something called "Heart of Gold," which never really did much other than get him flamed, which he loved. Anyway, there was, in retrospect, a community being built, and for a couple months, it was great.

I had decided to quit school sometime in early March, and asked Ted to help me get a feel for Oklahoma City. We spent a couple of hours driving around the city in his car, while he spouted off Oklahoma City COC bullshit and I tried to get my mind around what has to be one of the simplest cities in the nation through which to navigate.

It was midafternoon, I remember, when Ted looked over at me with a strange eye, and said "hey, you want to go somewhere?" "Yeah," I said, "what do you mean?"

"To meet someone," he replied. "Someone you haven't met yet."

We drove for a while in silence, me wondering what the holy hell I'd gotten myself into (he was acting WEIRD, and I don't like weird antsy guys with knives), him driving faster and faster, cursing traffic the whole time.

We drove through a rural area and into a sort of suburb of Oklahoma City (Mustang, I think), and parked at a Braum's restaurant. Ted positively bounded from the car, then ran back to grab my elbow to hustle me inside.

Seated in a plastic booth, at the back of the restaurant, was a gorgeous young Asian girl. She saw us, got up, and threw her arms around Ted. They held each other for some time, long enough for me to know that they were a little more than friends...and then she took my hands. She looked at me for a long time, it seemed like, and then pressed her nubile little body against me, and...sighed. I don't know that I've ever heard a sigh convey so much happiness, kids, right there in that beige plastic dining room, with pink ice cream spoons stuck to countertops and the sound of fries being dropped in oil back in the kitchen.

I also didn't have to look at Ted to know he was watching my movements very carefully and counting the milliseconds until she let me go, which I hastened somewhat by asking Ted who she was. I already knew it was Gwen, but my head was spinning and I needed as much time to recover as possible.

We sat and ate icecream, and Gwen bubbled endlessly about how happy she was to finally meet me, and about school, and my school, and books, and everything under the sun but what I was concerned about, ie, the fact that Ted was cheating on his wife with her. This really blew my mind, and I spent the majority of the conversation smiling and nodding and allowing the odd looks and sudden changes in conversation topics of the past few months to fall into place. Dee was lonely, but she also suspected her husband was cheating on her. Their whispered arguments, her immense frustration, all of it clicked. I suddenly liked Ted a lot less.

Ted spent the majority of the short time we had together with one hand on her thigh, staring at me meaningfully. I tried to eat my ice cream.

The ride home was quiet. We make minimal small talk about how "nice" Gwen was, and how "happy" she'd been to see me, but my immediate concern was how to extricate myself from the whole situation. I couldn't stand looking at Dee, knowing what I did, and I knew right away that if I blew the whistle on the whole thing I'd better do it from a payphone on the way out of town. I understood one of the reasons why Ted insisted on showing me every weapon he had, and I had no doubt he'd use one on a human being of he got mad enough.

Gwen 2: Deeper...

2005-07-09T07:04:00.000-07:00

Since I'm lazy, I'm going to name this one after the girl who eventually becomes the focus.

Ted and Jamie showed up one Saturday evening to help me install and set up the software for a WWIV system. Since I only had the dorm phone line, I could only run the thing between 11pm and 8am. This bugged me at first, but later I began to enjoy it--the whole thing had sort of an underground feel to me, as I started getting calls.

The board itself was called Midian, after the freak haven in Clive Barker's Night Breed. I kept it up for almost two years, in some form or another, until I got a girlfriend who wasn't into that sort of thing, and my PC died.

But back to the story: Jamie was in his mid to late 20's, bigger and taller than me, with long curly black hair and a moustache. I'd never met anyone under the age of 40 who had a moustache, but it suited him somehow. He ran a Mac board, so he was more or less along for the ride, although I think he talked shop with John about whatever system they were using while Ted and I were dicking around with the XT.

Ted was shorter and walked with a kind of confidence I later realized to be insecurity masquerading as ego--Napoleon syndrome, you might call it. He wore a beard, had a shaggy haircut, and in general reminded me of someone from an early 80's remake of "Grease" or "West Side Story." He was very friendly, and before they left I had a complete board, program for outcalling to his board nightly (WWIV was set up with regional hubs, so everyone didn't have to call every other board to get messages and info transferred), and an invitation for dinner the following weekend. Jamie gave me a big hug and invited me to Rocky Horror Picture Show sometime in the near future.

As you can imagine, the next couple of weeks were pretty sleepless. At first my room was crowded with people watching the new toy in action, but within a week or so it was just me, tweaking the board and waiting for someone to call. Which they did, moderately, but nothing really exciting happened. I began to sleep at night.

Then, sometime in the third week, The Girl logged on. I missed her, but it was enough to keep me staying up late for another week.

The next week, she logged on again, and this time paged me (I'd forgotten about that til just now, remind me to mention this function in context, if this turns out better than I think it will). We typed back and forth on a primitive IM screen for some time, and then she abruptly logged off. I waited for an hour, but at around 1am I logged off. I knew little more about her than that she was a serious flirt, and liked me a lot.

Two or three days later, she sysop-paged me again, and apologized for logging off so abruptly. She seemed nervous, but we chatted for a bit--and then she did it again. Bemused, I went to bed.

The next night she called me, voice.

Her voice was...a normal voice. Nothing special, nothing that comes to mind all these years later, but it was a feminine voice, talking to ME. What's more, she sounded cute. Now, I understand (from difficult experience) that guessing someone's appearance by their phone voice is just plain setting yourself up to fail. But back then, it never occurred to me that she would be anything but gorgeous.

The first thing she told me was that she might hang up suddenly. Her name was Gwen (spelled with a Q, but I'm not about to spend the next week mis-striking "Q" on this keyboard), and she was a senior in high school. She was first-generation Vietnamese-American, and her father absolutely FORBADE her to date (or talk to) non-Vietnamese boys. This served primarily as a challenge to her, so she spent most evenings sneaking off to call round-eyes like me to spite him. Thus, the sudden hangups.

We became something approaching friends--if it's possible to have sexual tension without ever having met, we had it, but we were so remote, and living such different lives, that it never occurred to me. Also, over the Christmas holidays, I fell back in with my old girlfriend from high school, so my time and attentions were turned elsewhere.

Which was probably why it didn't bug me when she started talking to me about the man in her life.

She first mentioned him a few days before Valentine's Day, in one of those off-the-cuff remarks that just begged for me to ask more. I'm perverse--I didn't. She didn't persist, and talk went on about various things until I fell asleep.

Valentine's Day, I got a giddy phone call from her early in the evening, which was very rare. "He said he loves me!" she squealed in my ear, "we spent the whole day at the mall, and he gave me a picture, and we just walked around and shopped and kissed, and he told me he loved me!"

She chattered on for some time, with me making affirmative noises while attempting to debug FORTRAN code (I know now, you cannot debug FORTRAN code, especially not while you're listening to a 17 year old girl yap about her love life on the phone). I wasn't paying full attention, in other words, so I almost dropped the phone when she squeaked "and then he said that if he hadn't married her first, he would already have asked me to marry him!"

Another One

2005-07-06T15:01:00.000-07:00

I don't know what I'm going to call this sucker. I really don't have any business starting anything right now, anyway, but I'm pretty stressed and need to feel like maybe I'm accomplishing something.

And this story's old enough that I probably won't fuck it up too bad if I get interrupted fifty times, which is pretty likely.

Back in the fall of 1990, I was living in a dorm room on the OU campus, with a bunch of other 18 year old dorks who were really into computers and/or Jesus. And when I say dorks, I mean DORKS. One of my roommates was a Mac user, and had pictures of unicorns on his walls. Pink sweaters. A picture of him with Uhura. My other roommate masturbated to a picture of a 486x33 IBM, called his computer Maryann, and left his room only for Bible study.

Both of these people were absolutely petrified of me, as you can imagine. I was still listening to Mercyful Fate/King Diamond, drinking whiskey in bed, and setting fire to Everclear in our communal bathtub. I didn't want to be friends with those guys, and I wanted them to stay as far away from me as possible.

But I got along well with many of the other people on the floor, even if they did use Macs. Or, in one astounding case, a NEXT. Thus, it was one of the other guys on the floor who introduced me to the fascinating world of bulletin boards, and their uses in picking up girls.

Back in 1990, the internet was a gray-on-black labyrinth. Normal people didn't have internet access--hell, normal people didn't even know it existed. I first heard about it when I was given an account so I could access the FORTRAN compiler for my first (and only) computer science course. I fiddled around with usenet stuff, but found that the same was true then: most people have no business writing things in a public forum. Either their grammar and spelling was bad, or their grammar and spelling was bad PLUS their reasoning was bad, or they were just plain ol' annoying. I joined newsgroups for Evil Dead, various bands, LSD, and bomb making, but soon figured out that most of the info was either WAY over my head, false, or just not that interesting. Plus, it was in plain text, which reminded me of my FORTRAN homework, so I just let it slip.

The BBS, however, was a whole 'nother matter. It was mostly text, granted, but BBS communities tended to be much smaller and personal, and contained a wide variety of information and people, instead of one exhaustive thread on one topic. And it was in color. ANSI, yes, but color.

The downfall of these things? One person could log on per phone line, and the phone line stayed busy while that person was on. As I became more and more entangled in the web of local BBS's, I found my modem (2400 baud, kickin' ass and takin' names) would spend much time redialing a number, until the last user had gotten offline, and the next could log on to add their messages to the system. I also noted that after a time, I could actually hear my modem pick up (or cease redialing) from halfway down the hall, in someone else's room.

You can see, then, why it's called a bulletin board. Things just appear there, and you can't ever find anyone doing it. Entire communities were built up, and competing software systems were developed. These were all public domain systems, and all had their own distinct features that allowed a group of BBS geeks to sit around someone's basement and argue for hours about whose was better. Not unlike motorheads or wine aficionados, only we probably had less of a tan.

Even more interesting (this IS interesting, right?), you could actually send someone a private message on another bulletin board system, anywhere in the world. This was accomplished by the actual BBS systems calling each other to transfer messages, and in some cases a message could actually be transferred OVERNIGHT. FOR FREE.

If this sounds a lot like email, you're right. That's exactly what it was, only much, much smaller. Think ham radio meets UNIX nerds.

This was all inexpressibly fascinating to me, but I was merely content to log on to the guy across the hall's lame-o site until he actually got a real, live girl on the other end of the modem.

I couldn't believe it. Neither could anyone else--within fifteen minutes there were ten or fifteen guys in various states of dress, shoving and craning their necks for a glimpse of John's computer screen. If you're picturing the cast of "Meatballs," or "Revenge of the Nerds," you're not far off. We couldn't help it. We were kids--shit, I was barely 18.

John had already blown his chance to play cool by the time I got there, in that he'd actually initiated live conversation with her--once again, primitive instant messaging, but only available between the sysop (system operator) and whichever user was online at the time.

If you remember your Tron, you know that Sysops are fearsome beings, capable of deleting your account, erasing your messages, or actually logging on as you and publicly announcing you liked to stuff Vienna Sausages in your ass. Sysops varied from absolutely inapproachable (Rome, a Mac board) to very engaged and normal (House of Ill Repute, which I'll get to in a sec). Even when your sysop was a member of the board, however, if he didn't know you personally, odds were good you'd never know he was around, reading your messages and watching what you read.

John was about as fearsome as a bowl of Froot Loops, and as soon as a GIRL found her way to his board (something Douglas Adams-esqe, if I remember correctly), he had jumped all in the middle of a conversation with her.

Within an hour, she'd talked to every one of the geeks in the room, and most of us had made fools of ourselves. I was the exception. I didn't talk to her, because I hated pushing people, and the line wasn't so much a line as it was an ever-morphing blob of cowlicks, fat, and sweatpants. Also, I'd read that she frequented another board (because I always got an angle, yo)--a board I knew.

Within a week, I had developed a rapport with the guy from House and the guy from Rome, and convinced them I wanted to set up a BBS. Since I had a PC, Rome's system was right out (which sucked, because it was more fun)--but Ted's BBS was run off the most complex PC software yet, called World War Four, or "dubya dubya eye vee," to the uninitiated. By the weekend, both Ted and Jamie from Rome were knocking on my door with a set of 5 1/4" floppies, ready to set me on the path to BBS stardom.

Lee and Pearl

2005-06-28T12:27:00.000-07:00

Lee ran the liquor store down the street from the old place on 36th Street, next to the 7-11. I met the guy shortly after moving downtown and losing my original underage liquor store, which was run by a guy of Vietnamese heritage, who got to know us at work because we played volleyball, and he'd played volleyball when he was with the S Vietnamese Army. Weird links...but he never questioned my age, and I tried not to make a big habit of visiting him.

Lee was a whole different kettle of fish. He was probably in his seventies or early eighties at the time, and a stereotypical bitter old man. Liquor was one of the few luxuries he allowed himself, as well as complaining about the government and shooting guns. His voice was hoarse but somehow still...sharp, unmistakeably military. He was balding and had a big ol' Sam Elliot moustache, yellowing at the lip.

Pearl was as sweet and helpful as Lee was curmudgeonly and bitter. He was tall and thin and walked with a pronounced limp, and as near as I could tell just hung out with Lee to have something to do. Most of the time he had a broom in his hand, and he would ask folks if they needed help finding anything. After some time pondering this oddity (the store was so small it reminded me of being on a boat), I realized that Pearl wasn't that interested in helping people--he was preventing them from shoplifting. Which was good, for everyone involved, because Lee hated shoplifters.

He never asked for my ID because I originally entered his store in the company of Jim, who was nearly 21 but possessed of the confidence of the truly mad. Thus, at age 20, I was incapable of buying crappy Oklahoma 3.2% beer from the 7-11, but could walk literally next door and buy all the liquor I wanted. Hence the taste for good beer.

We'd been visiting the store for a couple of months when we heard Lee and Pearl bitching about their pensions. Lee was roundly cursing the VA on behalf of Pearl, who nodded and swept and made the occasional exclamation of his own. Apparently his check was late, which was really putting his daughter in a bind, foodwise, and the VA had been less than helpful about the whole situation.

The whole situation was really pissing Lee off, though, and he said something that piqued both our interests: "Hell, government don't even pay me a pension, but I knew that goin' in! They're fucking you over!"

"Why no pension, Lee? That sounds kind of weird," I asked.

"CIA, boy! Shit, I worked in Angola, Sierra Leone, and Chile. Flew for the motherfuckers in the Greek Civil War in '47, didn't even know that's what I was doin' til I joined the merc outfit in Angola!"

"You're kidding me, right?"

"Boy, do I look like I'm kidding? I still got a price on my head for killing some prince or some shit in Angola!"

He reached beneath the counter, and pulled out a very large pistol. "This is what I got for those peckerheads if they come in here! They almost had me in '76, but I shot three of them with my hideout (here he shuffled to the end of the counter, and pulled up his pantsleg to show a derringer-like pistol strapped to his ankle) and got away."

Jim, as you can imagine, was fascinated. And, you know, I was as well. A real live spook, or former spook, living right down the street.

Minuard Foundation 7: Busted

2005-06-24T11:33:00.000-07:00

The weekend after our foray down south to meet our potential adopters, Bob and I headed over to our friend Charlie's house to watch a boxing match. We arrived to find a dozen people already in stitches on the floor, and a livid Minuard standing by the fridge.

Charlie had been so taken with the flyer that he'd stuck it to his fridge with Cox Cable magnets, which were one of the many benefits he received for selling soul sucking television programming to the underprivileged (see also Terry Taylor). He'd promised to take it down whenever Jim was around, and since I actually had the term "Minuard Foundation" on my answering machine, I made a calculated guess and concluded Charlie's attention span regarding the flyer was roughly equivalent to Jim's mental acuity regarding my answering machine message.

I felt really bad for Jim, I really did. He had the flyer in his hand, and his face was going red, and everyone was laughing at him.

His mouth open. It closed. It opened again, and his fist crumpled up the flyer, then dropped it in the trashcan. Jim was very, very pissed.

"What...the fuck...was that?" he hissed at me, as he stalked past me towards the door. "Strippers..." is all I could manage in return, which caused further eruptions of mirth from the peanut gallery. They did their best to appear serious when he glared at them in turn--but eventually it was too much, and Jim stalked out the door, followed by hoots of laughter.

Which is what he does, when he's that mad, and I appreciate it for what it is: an attempt to not commit violence on my person. If you're still reading this, Jim, thanks for not kicking my ass.

I'm sure we all stayed around and guffawed as we watched the boxing match, but I don't remember much of it. I knew the other shoe was gonna drop, and it wasn't going to be pretty. Bob and I left around 1am, and he was back on my doorstep by 2:30. "They kicked me out," he mumbled as he shuffled past me to the fridge. "Said we were assholes."

Which, yeah, we probably were.

"Did you tell him about the strippers?" I asked in return.

"Nope. Didn't have time. Looks like I'm stayin' with you."

For the rest of the summer, Jim refused to take our calls, see us, or go anywhere we might be. Initially, he refused to have anything to do with anyone who had been a part of it at all, but it soon became apparent to him that every single one of his friends had been in on it in some form or another. He was forced to back down from that, else he face a lifetime of having to make new friends, which is not an easy task for any of us. I received regular reports from mutual acquaintances of threats of bodily harm from Jim, but didn't worry overmuch about it. He was being a dick, but you sort of get used to that kind of behavior after a while, and I didn't really think he'd punch me if he saw me. Still, Bob didn't take kindly to being tossed out, and I got tired of hearing these threats as often as I did.

The rest of the summer was spent on the back porch with Bob. Whichever of us got home first would stop and get the quarts of beer, and we'd sit on the back porch, drinking out of paper bags and listening to the bums rearrange their pecking order on the other side of the fence.

Bob moved back to Tulsa early that fall, and soon enough another Oklahoma winter fell upon me like a think black blanket. I tacked plastic sheeting and quilts to the north windows, started cooking big pots of stew, and decided my winter project was going to be educating myself on the differences between merlot and cabernet sauvignon. The days passed quickly in my little apartment, and I busied myself with fish and wine and probably a girl or two, but I was alone (and a little lonely, I confess) when the knock came, just before Thanksgiving.

I opened the door, and there stood the Minuard, twelve pack in hand. I handed him my glass of wine, which he drained at a draught, then broke open the beer and handed me one, still on the cold kitchen step. "I have two things to say to you," he said. "Fuck you...and...I'm sorry...I guess...but you really are an asshole."

Which was more than I expected, or needed, but I guess it was something he needed to say. We retired to the living room, where the opening strains of the Star Trek theme were emanating from the tube.

Minuard Foundation 6: The Tour/DJ Tucker

2005-06-15T16:41:00.000-07:00

We headed out of Norman and drove back towards the city, stopping only for Bob a soda and for me to switch places with him. I dozed (which is ALWAYS what happens when I smoke dope) for most of the way up to DJ Tucker's place, and woke up (disoriented and cottonmouthed) after the third circuit of a massive apartment complex on the city's south side. Bob was lost, but I was recovering well, so we hit a gas station and called the guy's number. Miracle of miracles, we were in the right place. I grabbed a quart of beer and soon we were knocking on another ratty apartment door.

Tucker was a skinny white kid of about 18 years, who looked like Moby with rickets. The boombox was playing some Nine Inch Nails stuff, and two other skinny kids were sitting in a corner arguing about who got to play the next CD.

"Hey, man," said DJ Tucker, "you're the Minuard dudes, right?"

"That's us, sir, fresh from our tour of points south. You interested in the Minuard?"

DJ Tucker tried to focus for a second, then waved us inside. He gestured vacantly at the floor, and I looked down to find piles of...poo...dotting the carpet like a minefield. Little piles of poo, everywhere.

The smell was oppressive, as you might guess. Bob and I sidled carefully in the door, and Tucker headed for the kitchen. "Babe, we got any beer?" he called, as I looked for a safe place to deposit myself. No response. Sound of fridge door opening, beat, rattle of cans on rack, beat, sound of fridge shutting. Sound of 18 year old ravers arguing about Prodigy vs Lords of Acid. Smell of poo. Inkling of a doubt about whether we'd wasted our entire Saturday afternoon.

DJ Tucker returned, still slumped in around his sternum like someone had caved in his chest during high school gym class, but holding two beers. Bad beers. Beers we knew all too well: The Beast. Light.

I heard movement from the next room, but his lethargy had overcome both my own determination to make something happen and the Prodigy that one of the other kids had succeeded in putting on the box. The smell, the leftover pot, and the beer all combined with his utter lack of personality or enthusiasm to suck all the color out of a room that was already drab. I began to feel a little dizzy.

A swatch of some slightly less faded color caught my eye, which I clung to despite my strange fatigue. It was blonde hair, I saw. I sat down.

The blonde hair was attached to one of the sweetest looking girls it's ever been my pleasure to lay eyes on. She was short, with sleepy blue eyes and a (dare I say it?) pouty little mouth. Her body was swathed in an ancient tshirt, washed out gray like everything else in the house, and a pair of boxes that offered hints of soft curves below.

One guy argued for a little bit, then noticed his partner wasn't paying any attention and turned around. She looked at me, and pursed her lips before gently parting them. I was entranced by the way I could see the suggestions of breasts beneath the tshirt--small holes offered oh-so-tiny glimpses of her skin, retreating from light to shadow, and back again as she moved through the room and into the kitchen.

The boxers were silk, red and black paisley. It was the most perfect ass I'd ever seen, half hidden by the hem of her sleep shirt.

Sound of fridge door opening. Beat. Another beat. Sound of fridge door closing.

She turned and looked at me again, for a second. My heart faltered. I couldn't believe such soft innocence, such beauty could exist here in this feces infested, devoid-of-color apartment.

She glanced at Bob, then looked at Tucker. She said:

"TUCKER, WHO DRANK THE LAST OF MY FUCKING BEER? AND WHO ARE THESE ASSHOLES? MORE OF YOUR FRIENDS? WHERE'S CHIQUITA?"

In a second, I understood what had happened to Tucker's chest. He'd been mauled by that voice, that horrid, horrid voice, and flinched until his chest had become concave in appearance.

A flash of blue told me Bob was downing his drink. I was still somewhat stunned by the whole disconnect between sylph and harpy, but at Tucker's implicit urging I choked mine down as well. She continued to berate him. The kids in the corner sat with their mouths open, as if they'd never seen anything like it before.

Bob drove to the nearest store, and we got two quarts of Budweiser and made for home. I kicked back the seat, unable to shake off the doldrums of that washed out apartment, and looked up at the gray ceiling of the car above me.

"Bob, you ever read Watership Down?"

"No, but I think we watched the movie a few years back."

"Yeah. You remember when all the rabbits get to this huge warren, with fat, sleek rabbits who seem to want for nothing, but don't really have any personality or rabbit instinct? The one where they basically give up their little rabbit souls to achieve what appears to be heaven? Only it's not?"

"Yup."

"You too?"

"Yep."

"Will you stop and get me another beer? I can't open my eyes."

"Too bad. I'm going home and getting a shower."

"Zzzzzz."

Minuard Foundation 5: The Tour/Razor

2005-06-09T08:16:00.000-07:00

One of the next messages I got was a couple of guys named Razor and Bobby, who thought my flyer was the funniest thing they'd ever seen. And, wonder of wonders, they left a return phone number. I called them back the next evening, and asked for Razor.

"Dude, this is Razor--this is so fucking funny, man, you're the flyer guy, right?"

"Yeah, hey, where did you get that thing, man?"

"Dude, me and Bobby totally found it on a bar in Deep Ellum when we were in Dallas last weekend. This thing's fucking great."

"Deep Ellum? But I didn't send any to Dallas!"

"Well, whatever," said Razor, as I heard the unmistakeable sound of Bobby hitting a bong in the background, "this shit rocks."

"Wow, that's weird."

"Hey, man, we're gonna have a party down here next weekend. You should bring the Minuard--we'll have lots of weed and barbecue, and my friend's band is gonna play. It's gonna rock."

"Well, shit, Razor, let me talk to his keepers, and I'll get back with you."

"Killer, dude."

Later that week I also got a call from a kid who called himself DJ Tucker, who invited me and the Minuard to his house for "tea." I got his address, and told him we were starting a tour, and we'd be back in touch.

I was joking, of course, but after some discussion, Bob and I decided we had to go investigate. After all, these were the only two people who were willing to have us come out in our capacity as adoption counselors, and even if they were weird, or obvious drug abusers, we felt obligated to give them a chance.

The next weekend, Bob and I loaded up a case of beer in the back of the car and headed south, to Razor's place. His directions were confusing, but after several beers and a couple of stops at payphones for clarification, we were stomping up a set of rickety wooden steps into an apartment building.

Razor met us at the door with a bong in one hand and and a cutoff baseball bat in the other. "Never can be too careful, dude," he mumbled as we passed him.

After getting a look at the place, I could understand. The living room was furnished with a love seat, a coffee table, and a television--and a garbage bag full of pot. Bobby was in the kitchen, making poptarts or some shit, and there was a football game being played (loudly) on the TV. A big dog ambled in and sat down next to Razor on the couch, so Bob and I sat on the floor while he loaded another bowl. I offered him a beer, which he declined ("too early, man, too early), and then an uncomfortable silence fell.

See, I get nervous around people. I don't feel comfortable just striking up a conversation with strangers, simply because I HATE it when strangers start talking to me for no apparent reason. I despise small talk, although it's a valid way to get to know someone--but in this case, I had already figured out that I didn't really want to get to know Razor (or Bobby) any better than I already did.

It just occurred to me that you're probably curious about what Razor looked like. If you're a long time reader, you're probably wondering if he was Samoan. Well, no, he wasn't. In fact, he looked and sounded just like Otto from The Simpsons. Remember when Otto gets Homer hooked on dope? Yes, that one.

Bobby I never actually saw...he puttered around the kitchen and meandered through the rest of the apartment, but I was never officially introduced. I always pictured him looking like Beavis, though...so use your imagination there.

After a couple of beers, Razor handed me the bong. I declined. This was anathema to the guy, and I could tell I'd lost a great deal of respect, just by the look in his bleary red eyes.

"What? You don't smoke weed, man?"

"No, sorry. Don't ask me how I managed to avoid that bad habit, because I've got just about every other one in the book, but I just never took to it."

[I must say that I have, at times, partaken of the herb, but it affects me really strangely and I didn't feel comfortable being all fucked up in some strangers house miles away from home.]

"So, like, you really don't smoke weed?"

"No, really. Sorry, man."

Razor pondered this for a bit, allowing this new idea to percolate through the wrinkles in his frontal lobe. He nodded to himself, apparently intent on the football game.

"So, you guys did this flyer without smoking dope?"

"Well, yeah, pretty much. But we did drink a lot of beer..."

That fell completely flat, and I was beginning to wonder if he was going to summarily kick us out for not smoking pot when the door opened and a crowd of six or seven people came in. Razor's eyes lit up, and he furiously started packing another bowl at the same time as he introduced us.

"Hey, Ray!! These are the flyer dudes! The Minuard Foundation guys!"

"Oh, wow, man, you guys are fucking great. That thing was funny as hell! Where's the Minuard dude?"

"Well, see, he really doesn't know we've done this yet. It's kind of...a...surprise."

I thought Razor was going to choke on his tongue.

"You mean, dude doesn't know you're doing this?"

"Right, not exactly. I mean, we are going to tell him, but not just yet."

"Dude, you fucking guys rock. Here, hit this shit."

At this point, I figured there was no point in arguing, especially since I appeared to have validated his earlier high opinion of me. I took a big hit, then coughed up a lung for the next few minutes. Chugged a beer. Looked for a clock. It was halftime.

The rest of the visit passed in a haze of pot and cheap beer. By the time we left, Razor and Ray and some girl with skintight jeans and a Judas Priest half shirt were making plans to come up and visit us--in fact, I'm pretty sure we decided there was going to be big Minuard Foundation benefit party, on the day we decided to fill him in on what we'd been up to. I'm not sure. The next thing I can recall was heading downstairs, waving cheerful goodbyes to various muppets and cartoon characters as we hustled towards the car.

It was a weird afternoon, and we still had to go by DJ Tucker's place.

Minuard Foundation 4: Nationwide

2005-06-07T08:59:00.000-07:00

By the middle of the second week, Bob and I were having so much fun that we couldn't help but let our friends in on it. I'd confirmed my hypothesis that people would call strangers if those strangers came up with a good enough gag--my next question was: would they call LONG DISTANCE?

I ordered a second run of flyers, and we spent the week stuffing envelopes and addressing them to everyone I could think of. We also addressed some to various record labels (Moonshine and Wax Trax, if I remember correctly) and people we didn't know in cities like Cincinnati, Des Moines, and Omaha.

My friends were thrilled, and promised to distribute them as widely as they could.

I woke early on Sunday morning to the phone ringing again. Bob was asleep on the couch, so I grabbed it. Immediately I could tell something was awry.

"Minuard Foundation, how may I direct your call?"

"..."

"Hello?"

"...yesh...how much for the Minuard?"

"I'm sorry, you must be mistaken. We want to have the Minuard adopted--not sold."

"...well, I want to adopt him. now."

I couldn't tell if it was a woman or a man. The voice was deep for a woman, but too...soft...to be a man's. I flashed to Pat on Saturday Night Live. And began to get a knot in my stomach.

"I'm sorry, uh, there's a certain process, certain rules we must adhere to. We're determined that the Minuard have the best home possible, and that means we'll have to interview you, and inspect your home. He needs a large yard to run around in, you understand."

"I want the Minuard, now. You will bring him to me."

A soft grunting began in my ear, as I desperately tried to regain the situation:

"Ma'am," because at this point I was really hoping it was indeed a woman, "these things take time."

"Oh, fuck it," she said, moaning gutturally in my ear, "you'll do. How big are you?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"How big is your...cock?"

"I'm sorry, I don't really feel comfortable answering that question. Is there a number at which I can have my supervisor contact you tomorrow?"

"Ohhhhhh...ohhhh...."

"Ma'am?"

-click-

I took a shower before going back to bed.

Minuard Foundation 3: The Phone Calls Begin

2005-06-07T08:28:00.000-07:00

I was awakened by the phone ringing in the next room. I looked at the clock. 3am. Time to make the doughnuts. Shit. But it was the phone call I'd been looking for-the first one.

"Minuard Foundation, how may I direct your call?"

Female laughter in the background, then "is this Minuard?"

"No ma'am," I replied, "I'm Minuard's caseworker-on-duty, though, so I can probably help. Are you interested in adopting him?"

"Is this the cute guy with the blonde hair?"

(I confess to a twitch of a smile there--hey, it was 3am)

"Yes ma'am, are you one of the ladies I spoke to this evening?"

Giggling.

"Well, we want you to come over."

"I'd be more than happy to set up an appointment with you to look at the household you'd provide for little Minuard, but at this time I'm the only one manning the phone."

(notice the subtle insinuation of my own virility--smart, huh?)

More giggling. Whispering. How OLD were these girls?

A different voice:

"Hi, this is Cindy. We'd love for you to come over and inspect our...facilities...when can you come over?"

"Well, ma'am, I don't have my calendar in front of me at the moment. Would you mind leaving me your number so I can return your call another time? Tomorrow?"

Whispers.

"We'll call you back tomorrow, sweetie."

Hell yeah. Score one for the Foundation.

Ten minutes later, the phone rang again. "Minuard Foundation!"

A man's voice, lisping: "Hi, listen, we don't really want to adopt Minuard, so much. But can we talk to you about renting him? Like, an hourly rate?"

"I'm sorry, sir, we're doing our best to find Minuard a stable, loving home. I don't think what you're suggesting would be amenable to him. However, I'll do some asking around, and see if there are any of our other clients who might be able to help you."

Raucous laughter. A whiff of Judy Garland, and they were gone. I went back to bed.

The next evening, I had a message on my machine:

"Hey, man, this is Alex, and we really dig your flyer. We want to meet the Minuard, man. Call us."

Between 2 and 3 am, my phone rang twice. Both strippers (or groups of strippers) who wanted to either meet me or the Minuard. I flirted for a bit, always maintaining the caseworker persona, but found I was always able to end the conversation by asking for a phone number. This was kind of fun.

By the next weekend I had taken about 15 calls, and was about to pass out from lack of sleep. We hit the strip bars again Friday night, hoping to find some of the girls I'd been talking to on the phone during the week. We did--but they were on the way out the door to go to Dallas. A really cute girl with dark eyes and black hair asked for one for her friend. I gave her 20 or so, then headed into the mix for more converts.

Later, we drove through the Paseo, past a drum circle full of hippies. Bob got out to dose them. I fell asleep to the sound of beating drums and a stuck lifter in his motor.

Minuard Foundation 2: The Foundation

2005-06-02T16:51:00.000-07:00

I had a couple of thousand of the flyers printed up by my friend Lexi, who thought the idea was hilarious. She snagged a hundred or so and put them in a stack at the closest body piercing shop.

My first priority, I knew, had to be to collect as many calls as possible before Jim found out and killed us. I figured that if I could actually get him adopted by a houseful of strippers, or at least fought over by a few of them, then he'd be unable to get too bent out of shape at us. If you looked at it that way, we were doing him a favor, right?

So in order to collect as many leads as possible, I needed an answering machine message that kind of led people further into the snare. And this presented me with a quandary--how to link my phone to the flyer, without tipping Jim to what was going on? After a few days of mulling it over, I lost patience with the whole thing and recorded the following outgoing message:

"You have reached the offices of the Minuard Foundation. Currently all operators are conferencing with other donors. Please leave your name, number, and reason for calling, and the next available representative will return your call as soon as possible."

Thus was the Foundation born.

Over the next three weeks we distributed two thousand flyers to branch offices coast to coast (that is, people we knew in different cities) and around the city. Our friends were urged to tack them up wherever they thought appropriate (one dear, disturbed friend of ours just got a friend of his to put a stack of them by the outprocessing center at Chino, the maximum security prison in California). We had to admonish our local friends to keep this strictly under wraps from Jim, lest they ruin the surprise before it was ready.

We papered quite a few telephone poles with pleas to the better nature of whatever metalheads went there looking for the next hot band. We hit the other body piercing places, and I'm pretty sure a few of them made it to the bondage/head shop next to the strip of gay bars a couple miles away from the house. And to meet our goal of eventually raffling him off to a gang of bleached blonde strippers, we started spending a lot of time in those types of bars.

These were probably the best nights--I'd get off work around 9pm, Bob and I would shower, then hit two or three strip clubs. After a couple of nights of this, the girls from some of the bigger clubs knew us by sight, and would drag their girlfriends over to snag a flyer or two and sit in our laps. Around midnight, we'd cruise the areas closer to our house, and stick flyers under windshield wipers of cars til about one. At that point Bob would split and I'd head home to shower (again) and wait for the phone to ring. Soon enough, it started.

The Flyer

2005-06-01T20:41:00.000-07:00

minuard, originally uploaded by houdinisblind.

Here it is, folks, the last Minuard flyer in existence, as far as I know. I realize I just completely outed Jim, but I trust those of you who know him will keep yer traps shut.

Minuard Foundation 1: Genesis

2005-05-28T09:39:00.000-07:00

In the summer of 1996 I was living alone in a little one bedroom apartment in Crackville, which I told you about in the Robert Johnson story. For those of you too lazy to go back and read that sucker, my home in Crackville was a fourplex apartment building across the street from two larger apartment buildings, all three of which were on the verge of collapse. To make matters worse, there was a near-constant maisma of burning chemicals that only years later did I learn was the smell of crack being smoked. The only redeeming qualities the place had were that you never knew what was going to happen, and the Royal Food Mart across the alley.

That summer was good. I was living alone, without a girlfriend for the first time in about 3 years, and just enjoying the freedom of doing whatever I wanted. I had money, I had a car, and I had a home brewing kit. I was, I felt, a man to be reckoned.

In late July, a friend of mine came back to the city. His name was Bob, and he was actually a friend of Jim's, and stayed with Jim despite working for me as a mechanic. This worked out really well for me in every sense: a friend to hang out and eat lunch with, but not one to take up space in my little apartment. Times were even better.

However, my mind never stops thinking about weird shit...especially when it comes to getting people to stop and ponder their own lives for a second.

So it was that on my way home from work one evening, I noticed, for the hundredth time, a billboard on the side of the highway. For some reason, I began to think about advertising, and specifically billboards: how effective were billboards in getting people to think about thing? How was this measured? What, given the option, would I put on a billboard?

Well, I thought, that's a no brainer. I'd put Jim's big ugly face on a billboard.

"That's pretty interesting, self," I returned, "but how would you judge people's reaction to that?"

"Why, I'd have to put my phone number up there," my inner dialogue continued.

"Can we afford this?" I muttered to myself, pulling into the driveway.

Probably not, I thought, although I did some thinking about how I might be able to get a discount for hanging the thing myself. By the time I hit the shower, though, I'd forgotten all about it.

A few days went by, and I found myself eating lunch with Bob in a greasy subway shop near work. We were both somewhat bored, and spent the time idly trying to remember or imagine people's middle names. The topic then naturally changed to the one person who hated his own middle name with a passion evinced in very few of his other obsessions, specifically, Jim. His middle name is Minuard, and woe betide the close friend or relative that divulged that name to anyone else--especially a female anyone else. Only a couple of his friends knew the name, and he lived in mortal terror of anyone else finding out. We had, each and every one, been sworn to secrecy at one point or another--in fact, the only reason I had found out was because my middle name is pretty close to his, at least inasmuch as it's weird and starts with the letter "M." I always thought this was a rather juvenile concern, deep down, but was content to let it go--there are far worse insecurites out there, I've found...but as we sat amongst the chip bags and sandwich wrappers of our erstwhile luncheon, I remembered my billboard idea. Since Bob knows a little bit about everything, I decided to ask him what he thought about costs and procedures for getting a billboard manufactured, and how we'd hang it. He ruminated for a bit, which was his custom, and said: "well, a billboard's going to be expensive, any way you look at it. And you've only got it for a month."

We fell into another period of lethargy. Bob appeared to be studying the cracks in the sneezeguard over the salad bar.

"But you know what," he drawled, leaning across the yellow formica towards me, "any idiot can make a flyer."

I sat back, stunned with the possibilities. Within seconds, I knew it was going to happen. I got home that evening and quickly dug up an unflattering picture of Jim. In it, he had hair (a truly horrifying sight at the best of times), was wearing glasses, and appeared to be quite intoxicated. I say that because he appeared to be confused by the camera-his mouth was slightly agape, his head was tilted back, and his right hand appeared to be reaching towards the lens, for all the world like a small child or primate meeting a camera for the first time. Where this picture came from I cannot imagine, but it suited my plans perfectly. I sat down the following day and began to play.

The result was a half page flyer. The right half was Jim reaching plaintively towards the reader, the left half I wrote in the style of a classified advertisement. "FREE TO GOOD HOME," its headline read, "MINUARD."

Growing Up Weird 1: Before I Was Weird

2005-05-25T16:03:00.000-07:00

This'll be the story of one of the easiest decisions of my life: the one to drop college (flying in the face of my mother, every school administrator, and most of my friends) and say goodbye to a pretty nice chunk of money, scholarship-wise.

To start with, I wasn't born here. My father was in the Army (yes, he served in Nam. No, he doesn't talk about it), so my childhood years were spent in a constant cycle of meeting new friends and never seeing them again, in places as far flung as Panama (technically, the Canal Zone), Denver, and West Germany (who remembers a divided Germany?). And here. My mom's family's from here, and Dad's specific branch of the service is here, so it was kind of natural that when pops got close to retirement, it was here we would return.

To make a long story short: I spent the first eleven years doing what every adolescent and young adult in Oklahoma dreams of doing, short of going to Prague, which Dad was help plan how to shell in the event the Reds made a move on Berlin. Then, once I was good and used to, say, hopping on the ubahn and riding downtown to watch the Glockenspiel chime 2:00 (or whatever), we moved back to Oklahoma, to a town that wasn't even big enough to have a stoplight in it.

Strike that. We weren't even LIVING in that town, we were eight miles outside of it--which, since it's home to a couple of oil refineries, wasn't all bad news. "Smell that money," Dad would always say when we drove through the sulfurous cloud hovering over the town.

So the isolation I got as a) an only child, b) a military brat moving to a different post every 2 years, and c) ending up in a remote corner of Oklahoma as I approached puberty was pretty damn intense. But I didn't know--I liked it. I liked being able to read for hours, or get lost in the woods for hours, without anyone holding me back or even talking to me. Mom and Dad were both working, and I spent a lot of time either by myself or at my grandmother's house, reading Lord of the Rings or old Louis L'Amour western novels, respectively.

I got my first BB gun, which I was never very successful with. I got my first dog, who was a lot of fun to have around during walks in the woods. My only friend was my cousin Michael, who I'd see every Sunday after they finished church.

You wanna hear Norman Rockwell, homies? You want to talk about old time fucking Okies? Homemade ice cream EVERY SUNDAY NIGHT, ALL SUMMER LONG, out in the front yard, with my grandmother and great aunts in gingham dresses and the old men in cowboy boots and overalls. Rocking chairs. Kids collecting grasshoppers (and, on a couple of memorable nights, a few fireflies) with their hands and the occasional sticker with their feet. I hate stickers. Whippoorwills and the weird, Mordor-like sunset-through-postoaks, when if you squinted your eyes just right it might have been a volcano instead of the sun. And always the same people.

I was scared of some of them, as a kid, and was uneasy around everyone but the old women, who doted on their long-lost grandchild or nephew or whatever. They talked funny, even the kids, and I didn't have much to say to any of them. Most evenings there was a feeling that everyone was playing a game I didn't understand, and never would. As soon as I was able, I quit going to these things, preferring to explore the country around our new house, the next hill away from my grandmother's place.

I was uncomfortable around the kids, as I grew into puberty. They were all five or six years younger than me, and I'd spent my life til then either with kids in the same grade, or without kids in general. They had shit on their faces, didn't talk very well (or at all-I had one cousin who didn't speak a coherent sentence til he was nearly eight years old), and the older ones had motivations that were just plain wrong. The girls had crushes on me. The boys whispered and laughed at me. I was a stranger.

And that was with my own damn family. I'll skip over high school, except for the pertinent bits--you all have your own stories you can just paste in there, right?

Bobby The Pervert

2005-05-24T08:18:00.000-07:00

I think Bobby came back to work during the first winter I worked here. He was about six foot four, and at the time probably weighed a hundred eighty pounds. Really skinny, with unkempt hair and perpetually dirty clothes. He always seemed to have dog hair on him, for some reason, although he hated animals. Bobby hated just about everything.

Except for sex. And talking about sex. Which was unfortunate for those of us who had to work with him, at least those who had any imagination whatsoever. I spent a lot of time smoking dope in those cold winter months, just trying to blot out the mental pictures he'd present.

He hated women, too, which I never really understood. Such a base, intense hatred that I often wondered how he and his wife stayed together...I guess hate sex is pretty potent stuff, and she hated him as much as he hated her. They seemed locked in a fight/fuck spiral of unsurpassed intensity.

She would drive him to work every day, in a big ol' mid-eighties model boat of a car. You could hear them fighting (every morning, without fail) before he opened the car door. From inside the shop you'd hear the car motor, then faintly the two of them screaming at each other. Then an abrupt increase in screaming volume as he exited the car, and finally a door slamming and tire squealing as he started another day at work.

"Filthy fucking cunt," he'd say as he clocked in.

During the day we'd hear stories about how stupid she was, and how much she liked to be fucked, and (if we were especially lucky) how she let him put it in her ass the night before. One memory I'll never get rid of is how we stood in a cold, cold north wind, taking down Christmas lights, listening to Bobby talk about how his wife gave him a rim job. "Rim it, you bitch," he'd mutter, to no one in particular, winding holiday lights around his dirty sleeve.

The only time I saw him genuinely happy, I think, is one day in the early spring. There was no fight that morning, at least as far as I could hear, and Bobby came in with a spring in his step. "I finally got that fuckin' bitch to agree to a threesome," he announced to the room, "now I just gotta find the right hooker." I was actually kind of happy for him.

He left shortly thereafter, and I didn't see him til the following fall, when he pulled up in a lawn truck and told me he'd give me fifty bucks to look the other way while he stole equipment off my rig. Which was a mistake. Fifty bucks isn't nearly enough to listen to my boss rage and whine about how he's getting fucked at every corner.

Bobby also told me that at nights, he was running a phone sex line with his wife and three or four strippers. They had decided, he intimated, that they wouldn't be happy "unless they were working in the sexual industry." Once again, I was disturbed to find myself happy he'd found his niche.

Ten years later, that is, last month, he called out of the blue, looking for work. He's a couple of years older than me, so I wasn't surprised at all to find him balding and overweight. He seemed cleaner, though, so we hired him back on temporarily to do light duty stuff like watering.

Bobby was divorced, and his two kids (oh yeah, I forgot about the kids in the backseat for those arguments) and ex wife now lived in Tulsa. She apparently had gotten hooked on meth, ran off with a dealer, and had only recently returned to Tulsa with the kids. Bobby had been working selling cars, but couldn't find new work in that field because he hadn't brought back a "demo" car after he'd quit his last job. "Embezzlement," that's called, and dealerships apparently don't like to see that on your record.

He'd been married twice since then, but "hated both those stinking cunts" just as much, or more, than the first one.

I tell you, the anger and hatred rolled off him in waves.

Upon getting his first paycheck, he borrowed my car to go to Chino's, a little bodega down the street that cashes our paychecks. They stay open late, whereas our banks close at six, so the guys can get their money with no problem. I've known Chino for a long damn time, and never heard anything bad about him from any of our guys, either.

But they wouldn't cash Bobby's check. I'm not sure why, he wouldn't tell me, but he DID tell me that he "cussed them gooks like you wouldn't believe," which didn't really make me very happy. He hated "them gooks" even more than "Meskins," apparently because Asians didn't buy as many cars from him during his tenure as car dealer. I gave him ten bucks and told him to pay me when he could, and to PLEASE stay out of Chino's.

A couple of nights later, he told me he had a date with "this stupid bitch I used to fuck, who's a paranoid schizophrenic."

As you can imagine, I was doing everything in my power to get someone else to give him rides back to his hotel room, which he hated because it was "a fag hotel." And, from what I can see, there appear to be a lot of rather dubious looking men standing in doorways, so maybe he's right.

This paranoid schizoid apparently roller skated everywhere she went, because "the government wouldn't let her drive." This was later revised when she gave him some taxi coupons, which are apparently paid for by the state. Nice. "She's crazy," said Bobby, "but they're all crazy, and she fucks like crazy too."

[By the way, I'm offended by all this language as well, which is why I'm being careful to put it in quotes.]

Monday he came in during the evening and told me he'd been kicked out of Chino's store. Apparently he'd made a big enough scene to get that part of the surveillance tape rewatched, and Chino wasn't having any part of this dude abusing his family. I wish I'd have been there to see it--Chino's about five foot nothing, and Bobby's six four. Chino apparently hollered "Hey! You name Bobby?! You get out! Never come back!" while shaking a finger as close to Bobby's face as he could get it.

After I finished laughing, I asked him if he'd hooked up with the P.S. woman. "Naw," he said, "my fucking mother flew my wife in from Houston for the weekend, fucking bitch. So I had to fuck her instead. Filthy little beasts, with their kitty litter and tampons."

The next morning, we got orders for Child Support garnishments for him. And for something like that, there's nothing I can do. He was less than pleased, as you can imagine, but didn't let loose of any new or creative epithets, which might have been a sign of how pissed off he was.

He got over it, temporarily, because the next morning he was more inclined to tell me about the "date" he'd gotten from the "phone lines in the back of the Gazette," the local weekly alternative paper which apparently has a whole section devoted to "massages" and "phone chat." Not surprisingly, this is the first place Bobby goes when reading the paper, but he hadn't been having very much success. Both of the girls that had called him smoked rock, and apparently he'd had enough of that years ago. No word on whether they actually used the phrase "I'll suck yo dick for twenty dollars," but it's something I like to think still occurs.

After the second weeks' garnishment, Bobby couldn't stand it anymore. The "fags" were getting to him, he couldn't get no pussy, and he wasn't making no money. So on Friday, he packed up his porn and headed to the train station, after getting as much of a draw from us as he could. We'll probably never hear from him again.

What amazes me about him is how much like an addict he is about sex. He hates and fears women, but keeps going back, and keeps doing more and more dangerous things (frankly, there's no way in hell I'd tell a crackhead my hotel room, whatever her motives. I have another story about that, just ask) to get his fix. Never mind dignity--I'm not sure he ever had any of that to begin with. Never mind his kids (he's moving back to Texas, where he can send them child support at his own pace)--and never mind the IRS, which he's been dodging since the early 90's at least.

I used to think that everyone eventually woke up and realized you can't get away with it forever. Credit card debt doesn't evaporate. Taxes don't go away, and children grow up to hate your guts. Meth makes your teeth fall out, and acid gives you flashbacks. You can't beat it, folks, it's gonna happen to you, too. But Bobby's going to fight it to the end, cursing everyone in this world that isn't "on his side," and secretly hating everyone that is.

Gouranga!

2005-05-23T13:09:00.000-07:00

This is the entire text of an email I just got from a total stranger:

Call out Gouranga be happy!!!
Gouranga Gouranga Gouranga ....
That which brings the highest happiness!!

Sounds like I need to get some of this stuff, huh?

Butterscotch Woman

2005-05-17T09:54:00.000-07:00

This will be one long post--I don't feel like there's enough here to warrant multiple posts, but I'm bored.

I've been in college off and on (mostly off) for fourteen years now, I guess. I've suffered from a pretty schizoid academic career, though, so not only am I squarely in the middle of the grade scale, I'm also not anywhere close to getting a degree in anything. This is due to my unwillingness to commit to any sort of thing that might be termed a "career," and my love of...things less practical. I've essentially taken lots of history courses and lots of math/chemistry courses, before I realized that I really do hate chemistry. I love math, but it's not terribly practical either, and I find it hard to concentrate on that stuff when I'm working here.

But back then, I was in a chemistry class. It met at night, and one of the people in the class was a woman in her mid-thirties (how close are we to that?), named Mona. Mona had a fit body but a rather rough looking face, far older than the age she presented to me. And, before I get people opining about the beauty standard, I'm only bringing this up because she was very obviously lusting after me.

No, really, that used to happen to me.

Stop it.

But I was 21 or 22, and she was kinda rough lookin' and way older than me, and I just wasn't interested. So the semester progressed, with me trying to stay away from her during breaks and lab periods, and her trying to corner me at those same times.

Finally, after a night of drinking Cuervo 1800 with a couple of guys from work, I was too tired to dodge. She sneaked up behind me as I was telling someone else the story of the evening before (which involved a woman named Ursula, and is probably more interesting than the one I'm telling you), and after getting my attention and batting her eyes a bit (do you really think that works, ladies?), she put on her pout and asked "how come you didn't invite ME to drink tequila with you?"

I wound up giving her my phone number, mainly because class was about to start and I wanted to get to my desk and get this over with, and forgot all about it.

She called me the following weekend. For some reason I had money, and had spent a chunk of it on good Franziskaner beer and a new Burroughs book. I remember I was lying on the couch with my shirt off, because it was one of the first warm afternoons of the year, and I wanted to enjoy it. The phone rang, I put down my beer and book, and answered. It was Mona.

She wanted me to come to her place and drink tequila. I didn't really want to drink tequila, but I wasn't getting out of it that easy--she had red wine as well. After a bit of...discussion...I agreed to meet her at her place.

And that's the thing, boys and girls, the secret to getting what you want out of ol' Jefe: pester me. I really am the laziest person in the world, and I try to make everyone happy. Thus, I'm too sluggish to argue long, and I'm too polite to get off the phone abruptly. This gets me into plenty of trouble, especially when you couple these traits with, oh, a six pack of dunkel weisse.

Oh, and I'm also subject to flattery, and this woman was going through a hell of a lot of effort to get me over there. And there was the whole sex thing, too--back then, even drunken sex was better than no sex at all. So I'm a slut. Sue me.

I arrived at a small house in what I'd think of as a "family neighborhood," and grabbed my green bag full of beer (with the side pocket fulla rubbers). Mona met me at the door, and I smelled problem #1: children.

I can't help it--when I smell that mixture of diapers and vomit, it's like a synesthetic piercing scream in my brain. The critters may be completely asleep somewhere, but the smell does me in every time. Ah well. I was here.

Mona's roommate was another single mom, it turned out, who also didn't do a very good job of hiding the fact she wouldn't mind plunging her hands in my hair and riding like the wind.

Which, come on, it's sort of weird to get all worked up about freakin' hair, isn't it? And it's not like I'm the only guy on the block with long hair, either, especially given these ladies ages. Long hair was cool back then--hell, mullets were in when these girls were my age. Dunno. Perhaps they were getting their own egos stroked.

Roommate took her kid and left for the evening, Mona put her tyke to bed, and we started drinking. It seems like there might have been dinner involved as well, but I certainly didn't eat much of it.

We drank the six beers I brought, and she broke out the wine. It was german in origin, which I don't particularly care for, but it was free and it was wet, and she was doing the pouring. We talked for what seemed forever, and I noticed pretty quickly what was going on.

She was trying to get me trashed, yo!

Her eyes wandered from my face to my glass, and back to my face and then to my glass--and when I'd reached the halfway point on the glass, she'd refill it. HER glass remained nearly untouched. I didn't mind. If I was going to sleep with this broad, I needed all the wine I could get.

I finished all her wine. She darted into the kitchen and came back out with...Buttershots.

I've never particularly cared for butterscotch flavoring, mostly because if you have butterscotch flavoring, you can't have chocolate flavoring. But she poured me a shot, and then another, and then she kissed me, and it wasn't bad if I closed my eyes. We brought the bottle back to the couch, and she took down my hair.

The next thing I know, I'm on the couch, under a blanket. My feet were all tangled up in my pants, because my boots were still on, and my shirt wasn't anywhere around. The room was spinning, still, and I could smell that fucking butterscotch smell mixed with the odor of children and burnt toast. I've never been so hungover in my life. I kept my eyes closed and began to work on getting my pants pulled back up without making too much noise.

After a time, I heard the telltale rustling of a diaper. I stopped dead, but I could tell it was too late. I opened my eyes to slits, which nearly killed me, and saw the little kid from the night before. His fingers and face were red, his eyes focused on my face, and he was wearing nothing but a saggy diaper. He took another couple of steps forward, and said "I want kool aid."

Now, merely thinking for me was akin to grinding bits of glass into my own brain, much less talking. And walking? Sheeyit. So I just lay there, waiting for the kid to go away.

After a bit, Mona came in. She was humming a happy little tune, and had a plate of greasy home fries and bacon for me. She plopped down on the couch next to me and dragged the kid up on her lap, still humming away.

I opened my eyes. She was looking at me like I'd invented the polio vaccine. I closed my eyes again, reached under the blanket, and jerked my pants back up.

What does one SAY in a situation like that? "Hey, uh, did we...you know..." is what I started to croak out, but looking at her face, I didn't have the heart. It didn't really matter anyway--she was in love, and she had a two year old in her lap.

I left shortly thereafter, never to return again. She gave me her phone number, and called me a couple of more times on her own, but every time I heard her voice, or thought about her face, I was overwhelmed by the remembered smell of butterscotch.

And that's why, to this day, I don't drink anything containing butterscotch.

Stripper and Acid 11: Treachery

2005-05-12T08:30:00.000-07:00

It was cold on the balcony, but I had on a rather ridiculous oiled canvas coat I'd been gifted by Sketchy Bill, so I was all right. Nadine snuggled right up inside it, and for a time we talked quietly and watched the lights of the city pulse gently with our heartbeats. I tried not to think about all the ones that were winking out, since it was 3am, nor did I allow myself to think about just exactly how high up we were. One of the good things about ecstasy is how easily you can live in the moment.

And it was one of those moments, finally. Our arms around each other, her head on my chest, I felt like I could stand there all night, just smelling her hair (faint scent of sandalwood) and feeling her thumb and forefinger rub the side of my spine. After a few minutes, I realized what we were saying wasn't even that important--we were both focused on the body rushes from the E, which can sometimes be set off by the vibration of someone's diaphragm next to yours, if you're very close. And we were, at last, very close. I'm sure the picture sounds mad: two people holding each other close, murmuring gibberish and getting blissed out looks on their faces...wait, that's pretty much every Cary Grant movie ever made...scratch that.

But we were happy, and although I couldn't feel my feet, I knew she would help me remain upright. We talked, and touched each other, and felt the vibrations coming from somewhere in our respective chest cavities. We were content.

Kevin came out on the balcony and talked for a bit in a rather worried voice about what was going on inside. I nodded reassuringly, and he went back inside.

I could feel a warm spot on my chest where her breath met my skin through the shirt.

Kevin came out again, substantially more agitated, and made it clear to me that things were really happening inside-Big Boy was getting angry that neither of the strippers were doing stripper things, and Shanna had made a couple of phone calls to people she wouldn't divulge. Kevin's music selection hadn't gone over very well, and in general the natives were getting restless. I nodded, looking him right in the eye so he could understand how interested I was, until he gave up and went back inside again.

I noted that her breath, the cold, or the drugs had made my right nipple hard. I pondered this for a bit, until our reverie (five minutes? two hours?) was shattered by Shanna's piercing voice. She was pawing at the curtains, looking for a way out onto the balcony.

By the time she was out there with us, we'd managed to extricate ourselves from each other's clothing to the extent that Nadine could face and talk to Shanna, who wasn't crying but appeared pretty scared.

Shanna: "Nadine, I'm worried about those guys, and I'm tired and I want to go home. I called your aunt, she's going to come pick us up!"

Nadine: "What?! I can't leave! I've taken ecstasy with Jefe!"

Shanna: "We HAVE to leave. I want to go home--it's late, and this party sucks!"

Nadine: "I can't leave. You go, leave me here with Jefe."

Shanna: "No! You have to come too! Those guys are really mad in there, and they're running out of beer..."

and here's where, in a very small part of my black, wizened little heart muscle, I'll always have a place for Nadine:

"Well, he has to go with us, then."

Shanna kind of eyeballed me, then looked back at her and said "Bobby's not going to like that."

She started getting that walleyed look again, and I suddenly remembered where I was:

my first thought was how impulsive "jumpers" are. People who survive suicide attempts often say they felt completely normal fifteen minutes before the incident, but felt a strange (and very strong) compulsion to do themselves in, in a relatively short span of time.

I looked down, and the results weren't pleasant.

We weren't nearly as high up as I thought we were, but still, the drop would most likely kill Shanna if she jumped. And all of a sudden, I was sure she was going to jump. All night long she'd been acting impulsively, I thought, and she was convinced she was on a drug that made people crazy.

And if she jumped, I was totally fucked. Break my plate, mama, I won't be home for dinner again. But...to turn her attention to this, if it wasn't already there, might precipitate something that could have been avoided.

A dilemma. Should I tackle her? This was guaranteed to send her over the edge, mentally--she'd been assaulted (in her mind) several times that night already, and I had the feeling I was the only one she came anywhere close to trusting.

Should I yell for Kevin? That might tip her off, and wouldn't really help the situation when he got out there.

So in probably one of the most calculated goofy moves in my life, I grabbed the edges of my coat and enfolded both of them in a big, safe hug. I kissed Shanna on the top of the head, said "hey, everything's gonna be fine," and carefully moved the whole lot of us through the door.

Inside, people were arguing. Nadine's aunt was there, a rather leathery middle aged woman who was arguing with Big Boy, smoking a cigarette, and fishing another out of a red plastic cigarette case when we entered. Kevin was close to the door, with his boombox and a suspicious bulge in his jacket, giving me the "lets go" signal as subtly as he could. Shanna barged in and began yelling at Big Boy alongside the aunt: "Bobby, you can't go with us."

"Why not," shot back Big Boy, "HE'S going with you!"

"NO HE'S NOT," shouted the women.

My heart dropped, then rose a little bit when Nadine whispered "follow us."

A typical drunken argument ensued, where all parties held positions until someone out logic-ed them, then retreated to another, then back to the first when that became untenable. I checked the cooler, but didn't see any beer, so I edged my way around the room and finally made my goodbyes to the pissed off crowd at large. We were out of there.

Kevin and I took the elevator down to the lobby, and waited. No girls. We waited some more. No girls, but a suspicious security guard began to walk in our direction. Kevin flipped out the room key, and the guy aborted, but could still tell something was wrong. We wondered if they'd taken the other elevator down.

Of course, we missed them when we were checking the other elevator. Upon our return, we were just in time to see Aunt's hand, still clutching the cigarette case, closing one of the lobby doors. By the time we made it there, Big Boy was right behind us, hollering, and security wasn't far behind him. We left posthaste, but couldn't tell which way they'd gone. We ran to Kevin's car, followed closely by Bobby, who was yelling at us to give him a ride. This was absolutely impossible, because Kevin's car only had two seats, and I was finally catching on to the fact that Bobby was Nadine's boyfriend. Kevin squealed the tires leaving the parking place, narrowly avoiding hotel security, and we made a circuit of the parking garage. No moving cars.

I wanted to make another circuit, but Kevin said that Bobby was scuffling with security back there, so he pointed the car towards my house.

I was crushed. I knew I'd never see her again--my heart physically pained me, and I slumped so far over in the seat Kevin reached over to make sure the door was locked. We didn't say anything for some time--just tried to come to grips with what had happened, and listened to the thump of the windshield wipers. Finally, Kevin said "hey, I'm sorry about that. Who were those guys?"

"I dunno, man, just some assholes out for a good time."

"Who was the girl?"

"Nobody, I guess. Someone I met tonight."

"Someone you liked?"

"Yeah, but I didn't get her number. We took that E together."

"That really sucks, man. Well, here. I stole their beer."

We rode the rest of the way home in silence, sipping beer from cans and watching the lights change color on the roads.

Strippers and Acid 10: The Balcony

2005-05-05T09:09:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure how long we stood there, waiting for something to happen. I was having a hard time trying to ignore Big Boy's glare AND reminding myself the spiders coming out of the wallpaper weren't really spiders at all. I know that I had a small stack of beer cans on the plastic counter by my hand, though, when Shanna burst through the door, screeching and holding her knee. There was blood on her hands.

She was followed immediately by what seemed to me to be a snarling horde of baseball caps and shaved necks waving beer cans and whooping it up. Shanna was almost crying, and rocked back and forth on the floor like a little girl, blonde hair in her face. Nadine followed, and knelt at her side.

Liking to portray myself as a compassionate guy, I did the same.

The cut was superficial--in fact, it was no longer bleeding at all. The bigger problem was Shanna's complete loss of sanity, and the fact that my new football buddies were all staring at me like I was to blame. Well, half of them were, including Big Boy. The other half were rooting through the cooler.

Shanna was still convinced she'd been dosed, and wouldn't come out of the corner. This put me in a rather awkward position, for a lot of reasons.

Four hours ago it would never have occurred to me that these guys would actually attack this girl, but after watching their cavalier attitude towards her safety and comfort, I had my doubts. The pigs began to assume a distinctly vulpine cast, as they sat around watching her sob into my chest. Nadine's hand was stroking her hair, and occasionally my shoulder. It made it difficult to concentrate.

Furthermore, I didn't want to be stuck babysitting a squeaker. I wanted to be off romancing Nadine, which was complicated by the fact that the only room we could be alone in was the freakin' bathroom.

Last, I didn't know any of these guys, and for some reason at least one of them harbored some pretty good animosity towards me for some reason. Perhaps he could tell I wasn't impressed with the whole crew, or maybe he just didn't like longhairs, but I had a feeling he wasn't going to stand by and watch me cart off half the strippers he'd gone out of his way to procure for this debacle. Also, these were kids who didn't have any particular reason to like me: if things got out of hand, they'd roll on me so fast they'd get rug burns--and that's without anyone bringing up the letters L, S and D.

Thus, my own antisocial nature got the best of me again. If I'd just been able to sit around and eat jello shots with these yahoos back in the tittie bar, none of this would be happening.

While all this was percolating as best it could through the paisley shimmer covering my brain, I was looking around for Kevin. Kevin was NOT in the room, which was evident pretty quickly, but I knew he wouldn't deliberately abandon me, especially in my particular state of mind. I was at a loss, but was distracted by a cool hand on my neck. Ah, Nadine. She whispered in my ear: "Shanna will be fine, let's go to the bathroom."

Sure enough, Shanna was basically asleep in the crook of my arm.

We carefully extricated me from her hair and limp body, and perched her (slumped her, actually) into a chair in the corner. I muttered something about checking on the Bachelor, and slipped, eellike, into the depths of the next room.

No Kevin. Shit. I began to worry, but Nadine had my hand and pulled me into the bathroom.

"How much acid WAS that?" she asked, as I tried not to bury my face in her hair and inhale (still too early for that). "A lot," I said, "probably fifteen hits."

"Wow, are you sure you want to do this?"

"Do what?" I asked, less than wittily.

She gave me a funny look, and said "the ex, silly. You still have it, right?"

Oh yeah, the ecstasy. Fuck yeah. I broke it out, bit it in half, and gave her the part that wasn't in my mouth. What a relief--it'd been in my freezer forever.

She took my beer and washed it down, then hopped up on the counter and looked me in the eye. "So what do you do, Jeff?"

Jesus Christ, I thought, we're going to make SMALL TALK in here? It hadn't occurred to me that we hadn't had a second alone since that walk across the front yard, so many hours before. My soul, already pretty well blown apart by the acid, seemed to physically yearn for that sunset and gentle hand.

But as the man says, "any port in a storm," so I sat on the toilet lid and chatted with her for a bit. Conversation abruptly stopped when I mentioned something to the effect that I didn't expect on Saturday morning I'd be taking ecstasy with a stripper in a tiny bathroom in a hotel suite.

"I'm NOT a stripper!"

"Uh, pardon me?"

"I'm not some fucking prostitute, you asshole! I'm a dancer! I'm just doing this to pay my way through school!"

This seemed to me to be splitting hairs (dancer/stripper, not dancer/prostitute), but I felt the first rush of MDMA setting in, which gave me the confidence to swoop into the conversation saver: "oh really? what are you in school for?"

[Writing this, the hairs are standing up on the backs of my arms as I think about how absolutely banal and fatuous all that sounds, but hey, it worked.]

Her gaze softened, then jerked to the left as someone pounded on the door. I almost fell off the toilet seat, and my first thought was that the beating was about to commence.

Incidentally, it's really tiring to keep going from peaceful/soft/romantic settings to loud, obnoxious settings where bloodletting always seems imminent. But I digress.

Turns out the door knocker was Kevin, who had just left to get his stereo. He also seemed nervous about the jocks in the next room, and advised me to stay away from Nadine.

"Fuck that," I thought, "Nadine's the only reason I'm still HERE."

She held me back as Keith started back down the hallway, then nodded to the curtains. "Let's go out there. Maybe they won't find us."

The balcony. The last place, I remembered, I wanted myself to be.

Strippers and Acid 9: The Suite

2005-04-27T17:01:00.000-07:00

The most wonderful thing about the human brain is how well it performs complex tasks without the constant oversight of the higher brain. This is never more evident than when you're all fucked up on acid. In my case, I don't think I ever would have gotten out of the car and into the hotel had I not been distracted by something shiny and just allowed my body to go through the motions of getting where we needed to be.

There's a delicate line to be drawn there, boys and girls, most especially when you're out in public. Too passive and you revert to "movie mode," a way of thinking where you become disconnected from the events around you, which can be a very dangerous thing, for obvious reasons. Too intense in your investigation of your current environment will result, at the very least, in some unwanted attention from people (and believe me, your fragile sense of reality WILL NOT stand up to close scrutiny by security guards, parents, or police). Ironically, one of the best parts about LSD will be your undoing there--any object or feature in your field of vision will become an infinite array interesting OTHER, component interesting things, not unlike a fractal image (although fractals are generally copies of one another, whereas there's no telling what you'll think of the component parts of, say, your friend's face). And shortly after you become bored with deconstructing the mirror in the hallway (not your image, just the shape and texture of the object), you'll realize that the mirror in its entirety is only a tiny component of your house, and your mind will reel out into space, stopping just long enough at various points for you to visualize just how everything fits together to make a perfect whole.

Or maybe you'll realize it isn't a mirror at all, but an elevator door, and Keith has been making increasingly urgent noises for you to just get inside already.

After what seemed an eternity wandering around the hotel looking for the specific suite, we located room 420, and Keith slipped the keycard through the lock. Against all odds, we had found me a place to be quiet and not worry.

Or at least, not worry about what was going on around me.

See, kids, there's a downside to drug abuse, and especially massive quantities of drugs like hallucinogens and ecstasy (and even, it's true, cocaine): after chronic use, like, over a period of months, your brain starts to get soft and reality doesn't snap back to quite the form it used to. You'll get paranoid (the darkened staircase in my old apartment is a worthy story for that one, remind me), and neurotic. Cocaine's the quickest about this (especially the neuroses), but goes away the fastest. Ecstasy, especially monster ecstasy binges that go for multiple days, will have longer-term effects. LSD's most insidious, and the effects last for a lot longer. Like, uh, a couple of years.

But you're able to function. It just...well, it just coarsens the "reality filter," I guess. And that's all well and good when you're working on a painting or writing a poem or even working on a particularly knotty differential equation...but it can be disastrous if you've been filtering out something like chronic depression or anxiety.

All this is the result of a biochemistry change in your body--basically you're depleting your serotonin level, which is pretty easy to rebuild by eating certain foods, or, you know, laying off the shit for a while. But when you keep these enzymes/hormones depleted (check out Erowid for a more accurate explanation of what goes on--I just eat the stuff, man), over time you get some pretty weird thoughts runnin' around the old' cabeza.

This is all deep background info that's going to keep you from thinking I really AM crazy when I tell you that when I was originally told the suite was on the top floor and had a balcony (in fact, had access to a POOL on the roof), my first thought was how impulsive "jumpers" are. People who survive suicide attempts often say they felt completely normal fifteen minutes before the incident, but felt a strange (and very strong) compulsion to do themselves in, in a relatively short span of time. And while I didn't WANT to die, there was something slightly hypnotic about the pool-level railing I was visualizing in my mind. And this was all before I took the acid.

So I had plans to stay way the hell away from every situation like that. And by the time we actually arrived at the door, I'd forgotten all about it (to the point of walking on the interior-courtyard side on the way to the room).

Furthermore, upon opening the door, it appeared my biggest problem was going to be claustrophobia. The suite was tiny.

The front room looked like a waiting room. No wall was big enough for anything bigger than a chair, because there was a lamp standing on a tiny writing desk in one corner. Two Reebok hitop feet were kicked up on the desk, attached, I eventually found, to the rather sullen looking wrestler kid who'd poured the laced champagne earlier. He seemed even bigger than last time, possibly because the room was so small. Another one of the "older" kids was there, digging in that same beat up blue cooler for Original Coors and Bud Light escapees. Big Boy stared at me.

"Where you been," he asked.

"Dunno," I replied (quite honestly, I might add). "Where's our bachelor?"

"Inna next room. You see those strippers out there anywhere? You were all cuddly with 'em earlier."

"They'll be along, I guess. The blonde one was all fucked up."

I walked, suddenly lighthearted at the thought of Nadine, down the hallway, which was barely long enough to warrant the name. Even my attenuated visual perspective couldn't hide the fact that this whole "suite" concept was a shell game played by the hotel on unsuspecting, out of town guests. Or kids with bachelor parties.

The bachelor, as you might expect, was snoring on the bed, with one foot on the floor and his shirt untucked. The room lights were dim, but I was pleased to see no evidence of a pool. I checked to make sure ol' boy's head was to the side, and slid myself into the bathroom, which was the size of something you'd expect on a sailboat, or maybe in an RV. Avoiding looking in the mirror, or at my penis, I took a leak, then headed back out into the "living room." Ignoring the look of hatred on the face of Big Boy, I grabbed what felt like the coldest beer out of the cooler, and tried not to fall into the emergency chain on the front door.

Jefe Gets Bombed (A Retrospective)

2005-04-19T13:25:00.000-07:00

Here's the link to last year's April 19th anti-media screed. Don't get your hopes up--I always get hacked off at media coverage of this event, and I haven't had time to go back and edit.

Like I said over on SITD, I'll probably go back in and do another post, describing actually seeing the building, but for now, this might be worth your time.

Stripper and Acid 8: No, Really, The Cellphone

2005-04-15T15:59:00.000-07:00

My head turned when I felt someone touch me, and it took me a second to realize I was being held on to by an extremely short person. I looked down, and was promptly knocked flying back into my own brain.

Several years previously, I’d spent a lot of time in some pretty low-class strip clubs. I was mainly looking for a place where I could drink beer and play pool, but naked chicks didn’t really hurt my feelings either. The whole sorry saga of the Midway is for another time, but for now I’ll give you enough background to visualize my situation.

The Midway was painted black. The entire interior was painted black, and any scrapes that might have chipped away enough paint to show something else were so laminated with nicotine and tar that it didn’t really matter anyway. The stage was a pretty normal setup, a sort of square with a runway, about halfway down which stood the a brass pole, worn down to steel in a couple of places from decades of breasts and sweaty palms. The only light in the whole place was from beer signs, the light over the pool table, and some ropelight strung around the stage, as well as a couple of small lights over the beer coolers. The floor used to be carpet, but had devolved into a hardpack of cigarette ash, gum, old beer, and dirt.

The girls were a friendly mix of ladies who benefited from the low light level. There was only one or two who didn’t have some sort of unattractive feature about her, somewhere, which precluded her from going someplace more upscale. Some liked the freedom to do completely nude dancing in a small room in the back, some were downright prostitutes (it was whispered), and many, many more had fat asses, no breasts, or no teeth. Or some combination thereof.

It was sort of a local’s topless bar. You saw the same guys in there after their shift was over, and when a girl went missing everyone asked about her. Since I wasn’t there to ogle the women, I spent my time in the back playing pool (I suck) and drinking beer, mostly with Jim. We had a lot of fun.

But there was one specific stripper who got under my skin like you wouldn’t believe. She was old, and squatty, and had a loud raspy voice. She had a weird sixties sort of hairstyle, which might have been a wig, and smoked menthol cigarettes and never seemed to get the hint that I wasn’t interested in giving her a dollar. She bugged me.

Until one day, a couple of months after I’d started going there, she came up and asked how I was doing. I glanced at her impatiently, and said “fine, how are you?” more out of habit than anything else. I went back to my beer, and she sat down on the barstool next to me. “Oh, itchy,” she said. “They wouldn’t let me go back up on stage until I shaved the Punisher.”

Beer came out my nose. I bought her a wine cooler, and from that point on we were friends. She let up on the money patter, and I’d buy her a drink whenever I could. It was a good arrangement, even if I never learned her name. She was simply The Punisher.

Flash forward four years, to a club of a different sort, and a boy completely loaded on hallucinogens. As you may have guessed, the Punisher had my arm in her gripper, and was smiling coquettishly.

Her face was pale, and had a vampiric aggressiveness I couldn’t recall seeing before. Her hair was jet black. She had on enough makeup that I didn’t recognize her at first, although after a second or two the hair gave it away. Instead of the ridiculously outdated go-go outfit she always wore at the Midway, she had on some slinky thing that probably didn’t go out of style til the early 80’s, and it was apparent to me she was On The Hunt. I feared for my life, but I was transfixed—after all this time, was the Punisher going to take what she wanted? Would I survive?

I took a big gulp of my drink and got ready to run. She twitched my arm again, smiled lasciviously, and nodded at a kid of about 25, standing a few feet away and eyeing me in a rather aggressive fashion. “Isn’t he cute?” she mouthed, and glided off into the crowd, followed by the boy. She turned and winked at me, as they were walking out of the club.

The possibilities of the situation confused me. It happened so fast, I had no time to understand any of it, and like most genuinely bizarre LSD happenings, after a few minutes I wondered if it had even happened at all.

As I came back out of my brain, or became more aware of my surroundings, I heard someone crying, and against my better judgement turned to investigate. It was Shanna, with a couple of the bachelor boys, and Nadine. Shanna was rubbing her knee and practically howling, while Nadine attempted to calm her down and the boys grinned stupid grins and gripped their beercans with big hamfists. They seemed piglike, in a way. I was suddenly overwhelmed with a craving for bacon.

“Stop that,” I thought, “it’s this fucking drug! Pay attention!”

I carefully approached the two girls. Shanna began screaming as I approached, trying to wrest her arm away from poor Nadine. The latter looked at me apologetically. The former was screaming about how she was tripping, and how she’d fallen down some stairs and hurt herself, and how she was going to die. Nadine cupped her hand near my ear and whispered “she’s drunk. I’ve called her sister to come get her.”

I could see my chances of taking this pill slipping away, almost tangibly, until she said “but I’ll be staying. Do you still want to do that with me?” My madly galloping heart leaped. They wandered towards the front door, and I athe bachelor approached me.

“Jefe!” he slurred at me, squinting blearily up at me, “where’za limo?”

“Dunno,” I said, “why are you all wet?”

“Pourin’ down rain, man, it’s horrible! Limo’s gone!”

Raining? Jim was walking home in a rainstorm? Serves the bastard right, I thought. But I was still stuck here with no way to get home, and my façade of sanity was crumbling as the crowd began to thicken.

“Where’s the limo,” I asked, rather stupidly.

Bachelor shrugged and said “dunno. Prob’ly at hotel. Take this. Only two. I want you to have it.”

It was a room key for the suite. Any possibility that I could just wander off into the night was finally shot down when I accepted it.

“Where’s the fucking hotel?!” I shouted at him, but he was gone. I looked around—no one else to be found, just a sea of mouths and baseball caps and class rings.

Fuck.

I made a quick tour of the place, and couldn’t find anyone. I made another, slower, tour, and realized it was hopeless. All the faces I’d seen looked familiar, it seemed, because I’d just seen them a few minutes before. I was stuck. And tripping so hard I couldn’t even think about approaching a stranger. I began to make a mental map on how to walk home.

I ordered a drink, and found I couldn’t pay for it. The bartender didn’t ask, so I wandered back to my remote corner and seriously pondered my situation. None of it seemed good. I knew I could walk home tripping on acid, even in the rain—it might have been a pleasant walk, for part of it, but the matter of the room key, not to mention the matter of the MDMA and sexual tension with Nadine, was an almost physical handicap for me. I was stumped.

It took me some time to realize someone was shouting my name. It was a man’s voice, which meant it wasn’t anyone I knew or, in fact, was looking forward to talking to. Probably wanting more acid, or maybe it was a cop. I turned, beaten…

And saw, in a veritable halo of golden saviordom, my good friend Kevin.

“Hey, where’s the party?!”

“Uh, I don’t know, man, I think I’ve been left here. I’m really confused.”

“Yeah, you look it. One of those guys over there pointed you out, told me to take you to the Concord, room 423. You got any more of that acid?”

“Nope, Jim’s got it, I think.”

“Where’s Jim?”

“Somewhere between here and my house, tripping his nuts off.”

“Wow. He’s walking home?”

“Yup. Listen, can you buy me a drink? I need to sit down.”

Fifteen minutes later, we were in his car, headed towards the biggest hotel on the horizon. Something had been bugging me, and I hadn’t been able to pin it down. Finally, though, the bugs in my brain had calmed enough for me to ask him:

“How did you find me, man?”

“What? Oh, you called me on your cellphone.”

Jesus. Too much, I thought. I began to fantasize about going home, digging a hole, and burying myself in it. This is getting out of hand.

We pulled up to the hotel, and began the long process of getting me out of the car.

Intermission

2005-04-14T13:35:00.000-07:00

Instead of another Strippers and Acid installment, here's my favorite pirate joke:

A pirate walks into a bar, with a ship's steering wheel tied to his penis.

"Yarrr, barkeep! Give me some grog," scowls the pirate.

The bartender slides a cup of grog in front of the pirate, and says "hey, do you know you've got a ship's steering wheel tied to your penis?"

"Arrr, matey," says the pirate sadly. "It's drivin' me nuts!"

Look, kids, in Jefeland, a day without pirates is a day without sunshine. Trust me--stand up, step outside your cubicle, squinch up one eye and affix your nearest coworker with a livid glare. If you're really into it, stiffen up one knee and approach them with a limp--but in any case, it doesn't count as pirate horseplay unless you give it a good loud "ARRRR!"

"Matey" is still considered optional.

Stripper and Acid 7: The Cellphone Proves Its Worth

2005-04-11T12:02:00.000-07:00

I never learned the name of the truly awful all-ages club at which we landed, but I'd let you take an icepick to my scrotum before I'd go back there.

By the time we hit the spot, I had Shanna pretty well calmed down. I pointed out that there's NO WAY she got enough acid to actually die, if that ever happened, which it doesn't. Speaking softly and frequently also helps to calm folks down, and I had every motivation in the world to keep her calm. The inhabitants of this particular limousine were assholish primates to a man, so I knew they'd drop a dime on me in a second, if it came down to handcuffs or state's evidence. Jim was a close friend, but he was falling down the same hole I was, so he would have been no help at all. And Nadine...ah, who could say? Our love had blossomed improbably over the course of the preceding hour and a half, communicated through stolen glances and surreptitious touches, and a better-than-natural probability of sitting next to each other. But could I count on her? Did she include me with the unibrow wrestling squad, who got her girlfriend all fucked up? Did she see, as I did, that Shanna was a squeaker?

I couldn't say, but as we entered the club I had no time for further ruminations--I had to keep cool.

I'll save a lot of time by avoiding description of the club, and what it feels like to be in the middle of something like this on 15 hits of LSD. Go watch "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." The majority of the movie is Gilliam's best effort to film the subtle (and not so subtle) changes acid makes to your perception. So just go get it, pop it in, and at least watch the lizard lounge scene. Imagine trying to be cool during all this, with absolutely no assistance from anyone at all.

Jim had instantly disappeared into the crowd by the bar, doing his best to beat back Thompson's leech, which was by this time moving pretty steadily up both our spines. The mullet boys had disappeared, or spread out, looking for cheap crank or someone's sister. Shanna and Nadine had found some other boys, who looked me over pretty hard every time I came close. I couldn't tell what was being said, but I tried to find a dark corner and fall into it.

The darkest corner was, in fact, not very dark at all. It was also pretty full of people doing things I couldn't understand, speaking languages that were also incomprehensible. I began to get The Fear.

Then, miracle #1: Jim showed up with a plastic cup full of gin and a can of Miller Genuine Draft, shoved them into my hands and struggled back towards the bar.

Miracle #2, about 2 minutes later: Nadine's face swimming up to me out of the flashing, breathing crowd, asking if I was OK and making sure I wouldn't leave without her. I smiled what I hoped was an encouraging, happy, nonthreatening smile and nodded my head. She was gone before I could unjack my jaw enough to get words out.

"Good Christ," I thought at one point, "this is probably the most fucked up I've ever been in a public place. Can they tell?"

Thankfully, nobody was paying the slightest bit of attention to me. The only way I could tell people even knew I was there was an open space around me, where none seemed to exist around any of the other patrons. For this, I felt grateful.

Then the bottom dropped out:

Anti-miracle #1: Jim grabbed me from behind, shoved his sweaty face into mine and shouted "I'm leaving! I can't handle this, man!"

"What?" I hollered back, "you don't have a car here!"

"Fuck it," he said, and shoved another set of drinks into my hand, "I'll walk!"

And then he was gone. "Screw it," I thought, "I'm staying close to my Nadine, and watching the bubbles in this here gin and tonic."

Which I managed to do for about 1000 years, when I felt the strange hand of Anti-miracle #2 tugging at my elbow.

Strippers and Acid 6: An Aside

2005-04-06T09:34:00.000-07:00

I think it's important to give you guys some background on my feelings on LSD. Those of you who've read Sketchy Bill or Burning Man 19: Butterfly Girls probably have had your fill of this, but for the new people among you, here you go:

Taking LSD is one of the most intense experiences you're liable to have in your life, unless you wake up every morning and BASE jump into your cigarette boat to get to work for the CIA. It permanently changes the way you look at the world, and for me and the majority of my friends that change has been for the better.

But again, it's very, very intense, and it should always be used with great care in very controlled situations. Unless you're just nuts, like me, in which case you find ways to challenge your mental strength of will by doing deliberately crazy stuff like going to the mall to play hacky sack with cops. Or Jim, who gobbled a bunch before getting on a plane to Dallas several years ago. Now, that doesn't sound TOO difficult, until you think about being strapped into a seat (a window seat, at that) in a cigar tube full of complete strangers, feeling every vibration and bump along the way. And the takeoff g's would probably cause my head to implode.

So it's not for everybody, and I've heard it can cause real and permanent damage to people's psyches. Thus, giving LSD to a rational, aware person is a little risky. Giving it to someone who doesn't KNOW they've been dosed: that's downright criminal.

Let me clarify this: I've never, ever slipped anyone any sort of drug without their full and complete knowledge and consent. People that do this run the risk of causing problems for the dosee, compounded with the weird shit that person's liable to do before he or she realizes that it's just a drug. Think about it--what would YOU do if, on a normal Saturday afternoon, trees began to sparkle and blinds began to breathe like fish gills? Or, hey, what if you were DRIVING? Wow, that's too cool! Billy Ray's gonna be so fucked up!

Assholes. Complete and utter fucktards. To do this to a young woman who obviously wasn't quite right in the head to begin with is truly reprehensible.

And to make matters worse, I was apparently the only person around who had any experience dealing in bad trips, or with people who were freaked out. Most of the boys didn't seem to care one way or the other, and Jim's a little too...intense...to do much good.

Even better, the acid couldn't have been in the champagne for more than 3 or 4 minutes--for chrissake, the paper wasn't even soaked yet. I have a hard time believing that this girl got enough acid in the one or two sips she no doubt took before she saw the paper floating around in her glass to make a difference, except in her mind. Perhaps she'd had a bad trip before. Perhaps she'd heard about bad trips. Whatever the case, she was completely geebered out and quite sure she was going to die, which, thankfully, is something I have some experience dealing with (not dying, obviously, but THINKING I'm going to die). The bad news is that getting over that generally requires a quiet place with one person's undivided attention, which isn't exactly where we were going. All I could hope for was convincing the other morons to go inside the club and leave me alone with her, so she didn't march right to the first payphone and finger me as a big drug dealer. Maybe, if we hurried, I could get her calmed down before the other ten hits of acid met up with the first five and started making balloon animals with my visual cortex. It was going to be close.

Strippers and Acid 5: The Dose

2005-04-05T08:23:00.000-07:00

The boys and Jim divvied up the acid in the living room, cutting it into tenstrips (that is, 10 dose strips of paper), and then subdividing one of the strips so they could get a more reasonable dose. Jim and I split a tenstrip as we were walking out the door.

I remember that it was almost dark, and warm for that early in the year, when Nadine's hand caught my elbow. We walked alone for a second, and on impulse I asked her if she'd like to share a hit of MDMA with me. She said "yes, but not now. We're still working now." I nodded, and felt the little cellophane wrapper in my front pocket. Then we were back in the maelstrom that was the limousine.

The boys were badgering Shanna to take some acid. She didn't want any part of it, and already had the sort of walleyed look of someone who's just realizing what she's gotten herself into. She practically jumped on my lap when Nadine and I climbed in, and I spent the next few minutes trying not to listen to her and Nadine whisper about whether it was "safe."

Now, this is exactly why I'd never get in a limo with a bunch of bachelor party goons, if I was a hot girl. I mean, I've never seen anything bad actually happen (sexual assault-wise), but it's GOT to happen pretty frequently.

I asked where we were going, and I was told to the rooftop hotel suite at some joint just off I40. But first, we had to pick up our "under 21" contingent at some sort of all ages club around the corner.

This was bad for a lot of reasons: first, it gave Nadine a chance to slip away from me (which was certainly her prerogative, and given Shanna's only slightly subsided panic over the acid, fairly likely); second, I was on a pretty good dose of LSD, and as I've said before, it's bad to take a big dose with strangers, especially in a public place; finally, it's an underage club, and it was a place I'd never heard of, so it was probably going to suck.

I was engaged in some subtle leg- and arm- maneuvering with Nadine (which might have been the early effects of the acid, but I prefer to think not) when Shanna started to screech:

"WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS!!! WHAT DID YOU BASTARDS DO TO ME??!!"

That's when things went into bullet time. She was sitting beside me, and as I tried to switch focus from Nadine's thigh to Shanna's screaming, I noticed she (Shanna) had a champagne glass in one hand. The other held a small strip of paper, still standing straight up. It was a 10 strip of acid. She started to roll down the window, cursing up a storm in the hysterical manner of someone who has finally lost it.

I had to act quickly, and when I did, I acted out of habit. I reached out and stuffed the whole tenstrip in my mouth, then quickly chased it with the contents of her glass.

Strippers and Acid 4: Freedom and Enterprise

2005-03-31T09:51:00.000-08:00

The sound of glass breaking in the next room was predictably answered by a stream of rather burly men, and I began to make my goodbyes. Nurse Girl seemed irritated, although I couldn't decipher whether it was because I was leaving or because she'd bought me a beer. Whichever the case, I had the feeling that I'd better prepare to beat feet, lest I have to stick around til 2am and rely on her to give me a ride home. Another six hours of this place didn't sound very appetizing, as you can imagine, so off I went.

As one might expect, our bachelor had been up to mischief in the bar area. The Rumple shots had gotten to him, I imagine, and he'd somehow managed to tip over a tray full of drinks. The exact situation was never clear to me, as there was lots of shouting and pushing and bouncers simultaneously forming a cordon around our party and hustling us towards the door. It looked like we were going to be followed into the parking lot as well, so I think the drink tray must have landed in someone's lap.

I've seen a lot of things in my life, but I can't think of many things I've been happier to see than that white limousine pulling into the parking lot. What looked like a nasty brawl immediately turned into getting everyone's attention (some of the brawnier boys were already taking off their watches) and piling them into the car before the oilfield crew inside could get at them. Jim and I were the last ones in, and as I slammed the door, I turned my head--and immediately fell into a pair of lustrous brown eyes.

No, not Jim's.

"Hi," she murmured in that hoarse, sultry sort of voice that certain women MUST practice in front of the mirror every day, as if Monroe had strep throat or something.

"Hi," I responded, with substantially less grace. My mind was still a chaotic colloid of "Closer," the Nurse Girl, bouncers and brawling.

"I'm Nadine," she said, "what's you're name?"

I told her mine, and then grunted as a firm little bottom landed in my lap and some straight blonde hair found its way into my mouth. The hair flipped away, presenting a full pair of very red lips and blue eyes, and a giggly voice said "Hi! I'm Shanna!"

Strippers. Dammit.

Shanna was exactly what you would imagine her to be--the center of attention and loving every second of it. Nadine had black hair, and seemed content to let Shanna do all the talking and flirting. The boys, meanwhile, were evenly divided between getting beer out of the cooler, ogling the girls, and hollering out the sunroof. The groom was conked out again.

Shanna ground her butt into my crotch and batted her eyes at the guy with the "Holley" shirt on the next seat. I tried not to look at Nadine. Things were all happening rather fast.

After some period of driving, I managed to get Shanna off my lap and noticed Jim gesturing furtively at me. I swayed my way across the limo floor, avoiding cigarette ash and Reebok high tops, and plopped down next to him--facing Nadine across the length of the car.

"Dude," he said, "these guys want to take acid. I told them you had a sheet of it, and they want to buy it."

Well, shit. How bad an idea is this? Very, very bad. But I was a drug dealer, after all, and we hadn't yet gotten to the horror that was Fernando and Jesus [which you'll find in the archives, good Reader], and it was Saturday night in the limo. And, yes, I'd just fallen in love.

"Fine, fuck it," I said. "We'll have to go back to my house." Jim nodded and handed me the bottle of Turkey (god, I hate Wild Turkey). Five minutes later, we pulled up at my house.

The crew stumbled their way one by one out of the car, and immediately began pissing on things and shouting to each other. Now, this is the LAST thing I wanted in my neighborhood, but Jim was pretty helpful in getting them back in the car (where the beer was) or into the house, where the actual facilities are, although the groom had one of them all tied up while he vomited into the sink.

I grabbed three beers from the fridge and gave one to each of the girls. We stood out in the back yard for a time, talking, and I scanned the garden area for flowers for their hair.

I have a vine back there specifically for that purpose, it turns out. Well, that's not strictly true--I bought the plant because the flowers were so incredibly intricate and irridescent purple that they made me have little flashbacks--but they're very beautiful, so they make very good gifts for girls. The flowers only last a day, though, and girls at my house last even less than that, so I was pleased to find a very nice specimen of the passion flower (no, I'm not making this up) for each one of them. Nadine looked like a Polynesian dancer. Shanna looked like a stripper with a plastic flower in her hair. Both of them squealed and ran inside to find a mirror. I followed, got another beer from the fridge and grabbed the foil full of LSD for Jim.

Strippers and Acid 3: The Playas

2005-03-29T08:44:00.000-08:00

[Damn fucking Blogger, ate my shit again. Ah well. Today's will be better.]

The contents of the limousine had already visited several topless bars and pool halls, where they accomplished their dual goals of making their pool buddies jealous and convincing a couple of strippers to ride around in the limo.

To tell you the truth, they weren't a very impressive lot--only one of them (the groom-to-be) was our age, and the rest were in their early 20's. Most of them had the look of an early 80's high school football player, with blond mullets and tight tshirts emblazoned with logos like "Holley" and "Hemi." Typical Midwest City kids, out for their first bachelor party.

Frankly, these folks make me tired. They hadn't done anything I haven't done five hundred times, except rebuild a carburetor, but they were convinced they were tearing the galaxy a new one every day they woke up with a hangover. The only reason I didn't jump out at the end of the block was that they were in utter awe of Jim, who as you can imagine absolutely LIVES for stuff like this. And while I felt kind of greasy riding his coattails to the approbation of a bunch of recently graduated wrestling fans, it was a nice limo and I didn't have anything else to do. It was a Saturday, after all, and you only get one of those in a week.

So we headed on off to the next strip club, drinking Budweiser from a battered blue cooler and doing a lot of shouting and picture taking. The groom was already passed out, but recovered somewhat during the long drive to Valleybrook.

Valleybrook is a bit of an anathema in staid old Baptist Oklahoma. It's a one-street town that has been engulfed by the Oklahoma City metro area, yet like most of those towns (Britton and the old downtown come to mind) it retains a lot of the feel of being a small town. It's an anathema because the entire main street is lined with topless bars--at times so close together they look like some sort of skanky strip mall, with gravel parking lots and dusty, blacked out windows. I'm not exaggerating in the least when I say the only structures on the main drag that are NOT topless bars are a couple of gas stations.

The town seems to survive solely on the revenue provided by the taxes provided by the bars and the tickets they write for DUI and PI, plus whatever they get from the speed trap I imagine has to be in place on the east side of town. There's no school, no fire station, and the jail, I've been told, is actually a double wide trailer. Plop this thing down in the wilds of Nevada, and you'd have a Quentin Tarantino set just bursting with character.

So we arrived, and I realized that I was almost broke. Jim had promised to buy my drinks, but I really don't feel comfortable with asking people to buy my booze, so I did my best to sip the beers and watch everyone's back. This particular place had a separate "restaurant" area, which is the requirement for serving anything other than low-alcohol beer, so the majority of our crew was generally in transit from the bar, where shots would be held aloft every few minutes, to the strip club part, where dollar bills would be held aloft even more frequently. Since I wasn't really a part of the bachelor party (I just couldn't integrate, kids--despite what you may have gathered from previous stories, I do have some modicum of self respect), I spent most of my time at an out of the way table, nursing a beer and keeping a count of party members, strippers, and bouncers.

With big drunken groups like this, I have to mention, it's important to keep track of everyone's whereabouts. I learned this in a narrowly averted disaster, when a bunch of flight-jacketed hoodlums and I visited a bar on the city's south side. As it turns out, they did this primarily to tear the place apart, and as we were making our getaway we realized that one of our number was still inside the club. In fact, he'd been in the bathroom the whole time, unaware of the ruckus. But that's another story--I've just been anal about counting nodding heads thereafter.

Pretty soon I noticed that our party had indeed dwindled, and collared Jim to find out what the deal was. After much shouting and gesturing, we learned from the rest of the crew that a contingent had been sent, in the limo, to fetch a couple of girls from the club they'd been to before visiting my house. There I was, stuck in Valleybrook, with no money, no drugs, and no ride home. I retreated to the bar, where I purchased my last beer. Shit, you can always talk to the bartender.

But I was immediately set upon by a woman in a pink spangly pushup bra and matching panties. I didn't mind this, particularly. I told her right off I was broke, and was just along for the ride with the crew in the next room. She squinched up her face rather charmingly, and we began to talk.

She gave me the Part Time Stripper Story, pretty much verbatim. That is, she was just doing this to work her way through college (or hair school, sometimes), and really hated all the guys she had to deal with. And I didn't really look the type to be in there, what did I do?

[I learned a long time ago (after an evening on acid in one of the bigger strip clubs) that topless bar small talk is actually a highly stylized ritual, a sort of verbal flowchart where only a certain number of choices are actually presented. In this case, she was presenting herself as "Good Girl Fallen on Hard Times," as opposed to the "Sexy and Evil Bad Girl," who is a lot more raucous and exhibitionistic, if that makes any sense. Maybe you could think of them as the Nurse and the Biker Chick. Perhaps more on that later.]

Well, I just don't like to hand out personal information, boys and girls, so I told her I was a student too (I had, in fact, recently retaken calculus, so I wasn't completely lying) and, again, that I was with the bachelor party in the next room. Not being very good at socializing, I let the conversation lull, and she went out to dance.

She returned, after a decent attempt to aerobicize to "Closer," and actually bought me a beer. Shit, maybe this is no game after all...so we talked for a while, about school and bars and vodka, and I'd almost forgotten where I was when I heard the crash in the next room.

Strippers and Acid 2: The Deal With Jefe

2005-03-23T18:21:00.000-08:00

Given Beardking's comment, I guess I'd better give you my theory on bachelor parties, and where it came from. I'm going to skip over all the obvious rationale for not behaving like a drunken asshole because, well, I am a drunken asshole. I don't need a reason, and I also don't like seeing a bunch of fucking amateurs run around and get killed (or kill others) just because Billy Ray is gonna get hitched. This is the same reason I don't go out on Halloween and New Years (at least not in this city-being able to flee to NYC for the ending of the year has really given me a new appreciation for the holiday, but that's another post) either. Amateurs. And many, many more cops looking to make busts.

Furthermore, I've already done what I consider my time in strip clubs, and I'm over it. A sculptor I'm not--the female form begs little study from me, unless it's actually in my bed. Or on the couch, or in the shower, or wherever--but I never got any gratification out of just seeing a girl naked, especially once I realized that this is her job, and I was paying her salary. That put me at loose ends, because I tend to want to leave people alone and let them get their job done, whereas the whole point of her job is to keep me in her face.

Anyway, once you realize that no stripper's going to go home with your randy drunk ass without a serious amount of leveraging with drugs I've always considered too precious and dangerous to waste on strangers, the whole situation begins to pall. Let's face it, you don't get the best crowds in these places anyway (on stage or off), and it didn't take me long to realize my taste for slumming was pretty limited.

Oh, and then there was that stripper I took out of The Midway and attempted to make an honest girl of (in the loosest possible definition of that term-not marriage, but not rolling drunks, either). We nearly killed each other, her bartending nights and me working my ass off during the day, and during that time I got to see an even seedier side than most people get to see.

So by the time all THAT was said and done, and I crawled out of the cave I had half intended to die in, I pretty well felt like I'd seen the whole "get fucked up and take strippers home" scene come and go. No mas para Jefe, ladies and gents. It was depressing.

Not that I'm not against bachelor parties in general--I just hate the "this is the last time you're ever gonna see another chick naked, dude" mentality so prevalent around here. And frankly, the whole "men behaving badly" thing is a lot easier to slide into if you're in a place where men are already being encouraged to do just that.

My purpose, then, is this: make that boy GLAD he's getting married. Make him so scared of his friends that he flees to a different city and won't be in the room with you alone, ever again. Make him ingest more of anything he's ever been inclined to do than even I would think wise, because given the penchant we have towards dualism, he'll think twice once he gets married about falling back on a safety net. "Fuck that," he'll say after the first big argument about the checkbook or whatever, "I'm never sleeping on THAT guy's couch again."

A bachelor party, then, should be half sendoff and half warning to Never Fucking Come Back Here, Ever. And you can't accomplish that by going out and having what's basically a slightly above average evening with your friends--it's only accomplished by careful planning and subtle abuse. Preferably for three or four days, close enough to the ceremony that the fear doesn't wear off beforehand, but early enough that all parties can be out of jail and cleaned up for the rehearsal (or at worst, the rehearsal dinner).

[For what it's worth, Dan's bachelor party went pretty much how I wanted it to, except that I still had to give a toast at the wedding. Ideally, you're disinvited completely, but I guess there's some small part of me that's too cute and cuddly to exclude completely. And to all you poor wedding guests that heard that shit ad nauseum, I apologize. I don't do well in crowds.]

Anyway, besides the brutal beating my liver and brain take on an AVERAGE weekend, I KNEW that a bachelor party for someone I didn't know was going to be a nightmarish affair, full of abused limo drivers, strippers, and sticky limo surfaces. There's never enough ice, the mirror's never big enough, and it's always very loud.

But it was too late, kids. As you know by now, my motto is "give me one good reason why not." And I was kind of bored.

I got in the limo.

Bachelor Party 1: One Dose of MDMA

2005-03-22T14:52:00.000-08:00

Within a month of escaping the clutches of Sketchy Bill, I was back on my feet and no longer having weird flashbacks of guys named "Razor." The acid was still plentiful, so I generally had a sheet of the stuff laying around the house (ah, those were the days). I also had a single brown pill, the sole survivor of my stash from SF. I was in a bit of a quandary:

Ecstasy, really, should be taken with a single member of the opposite sex, in a space full of red fur, strawberries, and Cocteau Twins. Trust me on this one: you can have lots of fun on it in other ways, in other settings, but this is the way it's meant to be taken.

LSD, on the other hand, should be ingested in large groups, preferably with dwarves and clowns in abundance. If you can, Jaygo and Seej should be hired to do weird video shit on your walls, and lots of Severed Heads should be played at top volume.

Under no circumstances should you do acid around strangers, especially strangers who aren't tripping with you. If you do, you'll regret it. You can trust me on this one, too.

Anyway, my quandary was that I had no female to split this tab of ecstasy with. And it was burning a hole in my pocket. It continued to do so during the rest of the winter--no situation seemed right, no opportunity presented itself.

It was springtime, then, when the difficulty was ended. A white limo pulled up to the curb, and Jim lurched from the dark, smoky interior with a bottle of champagne and a fistful of one dollar bills. He pounded on my door, howling three words that strike fear into my heart:

BACHELOR PARTY, DUDE!

This Is A Reminder

2005-03-20T09:33:00.000-08:00

OK, dammit, I've forgotten about this story more times in the last three weeks more times than I've locked my keys in my car the whole time I've been driving (now I've done it, dammit--note to self, make someone else drive to church), and I'm finally at a place where I can write it down (the reminder) AND remember what I'm supposed to be writing down.

Next up: the perils of LSD and bachelor parties.

Diana and Joe 3: Innocent Treachery/The Bet

2005-03-20T06:18:00.000-08:00

At the end of August, the golden summer came crashing down. Bob moved out, Jim moved out (in the middle of the night, no less), and I had to break down and go back to my job (for most of the summer, we'd been living off of LSD profits, Taco Mayo tacos, and whatever we could find in the fridge). This final bit was the death knell, really--everyone else could stay up all night, but I had to be at work early in the morning, and worked til late, so I began to secede from the social scene.

This wasn't so bad, actually--I've found there are times in my life when I'll ingest prodigious amounts of illicit substances, act crazy, and generate fodder for these pages. At some point, however, that urge wears off, and I feel the craving for a bit more...structure (or at least a bit of a paycheck).

But the result, most mornings, was that I would wake up in my bed to find Joe crawling into his--or nobody in the house at all, since they had the decency to not tempt me while I was trying to re-adjust to Asian garment worker hours. Most of the parties moved over to Waynerd's place, which was a tiny, tiny efficiency (literally, a living room/bathroom/kitchen) about a dozen blocks away.

So it was that I awakened one day and found the purple head of Joe, face in his hands, elbows on knees, shaking back and forth in the early Tuesday morning sunlight. This was a man plainly in the grip of some sort of Trouble. And, despite my well documented misanthropy before 10am, I had the compassion to ask "hey, Joe, what's the matter?"

His head stopped, and without looking up, he muttered, "I fucked Diana last night. Shit, what am I gonna do now?"

The problem, of course, hies back to one of the other things I've been talking about here and on Seeing in the Dark: casual sex is NEVER equally casual for both partners. And given Jessie's belief that sex is The Ultimate Price You Pay For Love, you can understand ol' boy's feeling that maybe he'd stuck his foot in a bear trap. Because despite Diana's more casual feelings on sex, we had all seen the googly eyes, and been afraid for him.

Well, shit, I thought, I guess I can be a little late for work. I have got to hear this--because Joe was a clever quarry, and I didn't think Diana (hey, classical scholars, don't miss the Roman allusions here) would be able to bring him down.

Turns out the afternoon had begun like many others, with a case of cheap beer and some kind bud on the front porch. Waynerd was present, and had arranged to meet Diana and Jessie there as well. Upon arrival, and the exhaustion of beer, the four moved to Waynerd's place, the girls stopping off to get another case or two of beer. As I said, they were good girls.

Now, for some reason, Joe had been playing a lot of cards recently, teaching us how to play hearts. He was the "King of Hearts," I think he said, and was apparently pretty good--definitely better than me, but I have little attention span for that sort of thing. Anyway, his hearts playing was filled with reminiscences about his time in jail, which he'd apparently spent, uh, learning how to play hearts. Now, Joe wasn't OLD enough to have spent much time in jail, but still, it seemed like a pretty simple game at the time. And, from painful experience, I knew how focused jail life could be. Without books, all you can do is brush your teeth and pray, and I'm not much for prayer.

So as the beer was being processed in the livers of the card players, Joe and Waynerd took a commanding lead over the two girls. In fact, they won the first three or four games handily. They stopped to smoke pot (neither girl smoked, so it was all the boys on this), then began again. The girls, mysteriously, spanked the shit out of the boys. They played again--same result. Joe's manhood was being impunged, of course, even moreso once Jessie revealed that she'd learned to play hearts with her grandmother, visiting her on weekends.

More dope was smoked, more beers were drank. The case of beer closer to the boys was empty, so they started in on the girl's case, which wasn't nearly as empty (pay attention, bubba--that was a Clue). Everyone was all giggly now, and the girls upped the ante a bit:

"OK, we want to bet! If you guys win this next game, you can sleep with us. If WE win, you have to wash our cars, over at Jefe's house, naked!"

Now, ladies and gentlemen, I'm not sure if Joe realized what he was up against at this point or not. He gave no indication at the time-and I can't say for sure that I would either, after that intake of beer and (especially) pot. But perhaps, now that I sit and write this, he did--and played the next game with the desperation of a man who knows he's doomed, and doomed implicitly by his own friend and partner, Waynerd.

Because you and I know Waynerd, and this is the guy who'd cut you off at the ankles for $2.50. After six weeks of chasing after Jessie, he would have sold his own mother to the communists for just a sniff of her panties, if you'll pardon the mental picture.

And so it was that Joe fought a mighty battle of hearts, standing against two nubile young females (one with a screechy laugh) and his own best friend. He battled, but as we know, couldn't lose. The girls had beat him to the bottom.

Triumphant, Waynerd's eyes lit up as he eyed his prize. Joe slunk off to the bathroom, which probably only made it worse. The anticipation, you know.

By the time Joe returned, Waynerd and Jessie were already in the bed, making out like fools, and Diana was batting her eyelashes and unbuttoning her blouse.

He ran.

He ran downstairs, got in the LTD, fired up the Bass Cannon, and pulled out his pipe. Smoking, he contemplated what had gone wrong, and why his dashlights didn't work. He contemplated whether he should actually go through with it, and the ramifications of both courses of action. Waynerd got in the car beside him, in boxers.

We both know what Waynerd's thoughts were on the matter. "Dude, she won't sleep with ME unless YOU sleep with DIANA. (puff) Come on, man, come on! A bet's a bet! You can't do this to me, man, it's not FAIR. Come on, you'll hurt her feelings, dude. I mean, it's all over now, anyway (puff)--she'll never overcome a humiliation like this, if you don't go through with it, and we'll lose all our girl crew. Come on, man, oh, here, this is cashed."

So, in the end, Joe trudged back up the stairs, in front of a prancing Waynerd, and entered the kitchen, where Diana had a blanket or two laid down over the bacon fat- and Doc Marten dirt-laden carpet.

There, we leave our characters, as they do what neither you nor I want to know more about.

Brought low by treachery and his own ego, boys and girls.

Joe didn't see Diana for another year and a half or so--whenever she would come in, or he would know she was coming, he'd flee--if necessary, by a back window or door. He moved out of my house shortly thereafter, never to return (but leaving me his bed, which was comfortable stacked with mine.

The girls, for their part, continued to come around for the rest of the year. Jessie got The Phone Call from Waynerd, resulting in a weird trip to the Old Downtown, where Waynerd told her, next to a campfire built in the lee of an old school bus-turned-apartment, that he had sex warts, and she might want to get checked out. Diana showed up at my place fairly regularly, until a very strange night spent driving around town probing my defenses about whether I was attracted to her. Nope. Ah well, at least I got a hot shower out of the deal.

Diana and Joe 2: The Long Summer

2005-03-19T12:14:00.000-08:00

The summer in question has enough stories for me to tell for the rest of my life, but as a consequence it's hard to sit down and pick out one thread of the whole pattern, and tell it. Many stories are short--many of them aren't very funny, or aren't very appealing unless you're there. Most of life is like that, I find.

But I digress. By late summer, a vague sort of pairing up had occurred, in which it was well known who wanted to sleep with whom. Perhaps this had been happening all along, and I was just too dumb to recognize it. Or perhaps I saw it all along, and just didn't care--now, of course, I'm compelled to drag all this out and put it to paper, lest I forget--and lest you go elsewhere to waste a few minutes of your otherwise productive day.

Jessie was the one saving her maidenhood for marriage. She was nice looking, in a very classic Midwestern-standard way--always well combed hair, makeup, and feminine clothing. All that I could have forgiven her, if she hadn't been clinging to that excruciatingly weird idea about her hymen. It wasn't so much the hymen, for me, or the "saving herself" bit, even: it was what was behind that idea. Marriage, inlaws, mortgage payments, and diapers--all things I couldn't even contemplate without a stiff drink. So, while we flirted a bit, I never pursued her, because I knew exactly where that pursuit would lead me.

Instead, she flirted pretty heavily with our friend Waynerd, who I've mentioned before (he's the guy I bet $5 with in The Worst Date of My Life). Waynerd, I'll point out again, is not our good friend at Big Cliche--that would be an insult I would never survive making.

Waynerd was a good looking kid, tending towards vanity and not above a bit of beer-wahooing or car-stereo theiving with his friends Circle J and Travis (see how the network expands?). He was a consummate liar, and most importantly, would say ANYTHING to get into a girl's pants. At the time, though, I thought he'd met his match with Jessie.

Diana was quite a bit different. She couldn't get rid of her virginity fast enough, I think, and loved nothing more than cute boys on acid, preferably boys in black leather gyrating to Front 242 or the like. She had bobbed black hair, wore too much makeup, and had the most annoying laugh I've ever heard--but a pair of breasts that made Jim and quite a few other guys drop their drinks. Me, I couldn't get past the laugh.

But since we all spent so much time around each other, it seemed natural that she would gravitate towards Joe, the goth with the purple hair and pierced nipples (he actually pierced them HIMSELF, in our bathroom). Joe was unimpressed--like me, the laugh and her generally raucous way of speaking (and she did love to speak) overwhelmed any attraction we might have had for her.

Lastly, there was Jennifer. Jennifer, to be succinct, was a scary bitch. She dressed like Marilyn Manson and was built like a tank--the first phrase that comes to mind is "big boned," and when I say that I don't mean it as a euphemism for "fat." The girl had big, thick bones, and there wasn't an ounce of fat on her. And she was scary--she could make a man get up and leave the room just by staring at him for a while, and there always seemed to be anger just beneath the surface of what she said. She didn't say much, either, which meant that every word had to be carefully parsed for meaning. Even when she smiled, it was a predatory smile. The most comforting thing about her was the 12 pack of Bud Dry she always brought with her.

But even goth linebackers like her need love, so she eventually hooked up with TC, the human beatbox, designated monkey, and marathon walking machine. TC was homeless and lived on people's couches, goodwill, and stolen beer. He was a good guy to have around when you needed a guinea pig for new lots of acid, anything climbed, or a ridealong for supply procurement. Unfortunately, he didn't bathe very often, so having him around was a mixed blessing at best.

By the beginning of August, Diana had worked up a pretty good set of puppy dog eyes for Joe, which became increasingly difficult for everyone to bear. Furthermore, Waynerd had been pressing his case with Jessie pretty regularly, so the stage was set for disaster.

Diana and Joe 1: Here We Go Again

2005-03-17T11:24:00.000-08:00

But this time, it's not about ME having sex, so feel free to snigger publicly.

The time was the summer of 93. We had a pretty good house, and a set of pretty good lives, and we didn't need a lot of money (which was good, because nobody was really doing a lot of job hunting). We had friends, and more importantly, we had a few female friends who would eventually get frustrated because there was no toilet paper, or nothing to eat, and would arrive laden with groceries. This sounds like a fairy tale, I know, especially since none of us were in rock bands or anything, but I swear, it happened regularly. And by "regularly," I mean, like, 3 times. But that makes you feel good, boys and girls, because that means someone cares enough to want you to stay alive--whereas the rest of the presents I've gotten in my life (from cocaine and crystal to Jim Beam and Kid Rock records) have all tended to shorten it.

So we were feeling good, my roommates and I. It was an old two bedroom house, with one bathroom which was accessible only through the bedrooms, and the fuses would blow if you tried to run two air conditioners at once, but we loved it. In retrospect, there was a sense of community there that I don't think I've ever recovered, til the Burn.

In the North Bedroom (from North to South): Joe and me. Joe was a sort of proto-goth (in that he liked large doses of LSD and Skinny Puppy, and dyed his hair purple) that I'd met at New Orleans Cafe, somehow. Joe drove a 68 LTD, maroon and rust, and had spent the money for fixing the headlights and brakes on something called a "Bass Cannon," which was some sort of subwoofer that made the back seat of the car fairly unliveable unless you had previously ingested LSD. Which was fine by me.

In the South Bedroom (also wik): Bob and Jim. Jim, being the first of the roommates to arrive, had appropriated the spot near the south window, which will come into play later when I tell you the story of the guy who attempted to steal my weedeater. Jim you already know, or know of, through a few other stories here.

Bob was a bit of an enigma. His claim to fame was that he had a head shaped almost identically to Butthead's, except with a slightly less offensive sneer on his face. Bob was older than we were, but didn't look like it--in fact, he looked younger and inoffensive, almost...innocent. This belied the fact that by far, he was the most amoral among us, and prone to the oddest eccentricities. He loved fucking with people who were inebriated, and to that end, he'd often start drinking late in the party, just to make sure he had the edge. Occasionally, he would disappear for a week or so, and return to his ex wife, where they would try once again to make a go of a relationship that probably kept foundering on his sheer perversity.

All of these guys, in other words, were people of my own stripe.

Jim was dating a girl named Becky, and Becky had a couple of friends named Diana and Jessie (actually, that's not Jessie's real name, but I've been sitting here for 10 minutes and I can't think of it, so Jessie she is), and Diana had a friend named Jennifer. These were the main features, so to speak, along with Tiffany the Younger and Lisa, AKA Peppermint Patty, who were both New Orleans Cafe kids.

[For those obsessively keeping track of names here, TTY is called that to differentiate her from TFTSOK (Tiffany from the Story of Kim)]

Now, it's important to realize that these girls were sort of off limits sexually, for various reasons. I can't speak for the other boys, but for me, they were either dumb, obsessively...moral (by which I mean they were still intent on being virgins til their wedding night, which is fine, really, but it kind of weirds me out in a way I can't describe without even MORE parenthetical expressions and obscure punctuation)...or had some extremely annoying characteristic (which I'll get to in a bit). Also, yes, none of them seemed too inclined to sleep with us (at least, initially).

So it was a happy summer, full of drugs and gallon jugs of wine, loud Ministry and Fugazi and Prodigy. Looking back, I honestly can't remember a time that summer when there was sexual tension between me and ANY of these women, except for...well, come to think of it, there was quite a bit, but this will be a long story.

Aides to the Ex President 8: The Game

2005-03-10T13:05:00.000-08:00

The restaurant manager soon broke from the doorway and headed over to the bar, followed by one of the waiters with an extension cord. The heat appeared to be off for the moment, but I drank off half of my gin and tonic just to be within striking distance of finishing up before we got tossed.

The sounds on the staircase began to coalesce into Jim's voice, roundly cursing the Dallas Cowboys and, occasionally, me. This gradually got louder, and within a couple of minutes I was treated to the sight of his hunched over form, carrying one end of a big screen television. The bartender and another waiter had the other end, and before long this group was scurrying around like roadies for KISS, while Jim bellowed orders like the Dread Pirate Roberts.

Jenna appeared beside him, with a water glass full of Wild Turkey. He waved her impatiently away, so she brought it over to me.

"What the hell's going on?" I asked, still a little freaked out by the peripheral Algeria, my changing clothes, and the general feeling that we'd Gone Too Far.

She gave me a dirty look and wandered off. I shrugged. Huh, wonder what Jim said to her. I took a sip of Jim's drink, then wandered over to the bar.

Dave, the manager, had been taken out of the equation by Jim's bellowing about "total coverage" and "that cocksucker Aikman," so we had a few minutes to talk while he got me some ice for the whiskey.

[For those of you playing "Jeff's Liver" at home, this is AFTER I quit drinking whiskey straight out of the bottle and BEFORE I quit drinking straight whiskey altogether. Well, with some exceptions.]

"Did you really do that?" Dave said, watching me out of the corner of his eye.

I looked at him quizzically. "What?"

"Jim said you traded your press passes for a couple of hookers last night, while he slept. He said you were lucky to get out of that hotel alive!"

"Uh, well, what do YOU think?"

The guy sort of smirked and busied himself washing glasses: "If you want to know the truth, he's more the hooker type. Anyway, I don't mind. This is turning out to be one of the best nights we've had since I've worked here, and if he's willing to do all the work to get that TV up here, and ramrod the party, I don't care WHO you are. You could work for the Economist, for all I care-if you're with that freak, I know you'll write something good about us."

"What on earth?" I thought, "is he on to us? Or is this a bribe?"

He slid me a beer and began shouting at the bartender, who seemed hypnotized by the growing crowd around the television, and Jim. I slipped back to the table, looked at the ice, then dumped it over the railing. "Fuck it," I thought. "The cold will slow me down."

I took a couple of pages of pretty incoherent notes, attempted to sketch the crowd, and sipped on Jim's forgotten water glass. Jenna kept bringing me beer, but didn't have much to say. Guess she didn't approve of hookers.

It was halftime before I realized the game was even on--from my vantage on the roof, there were too many people blocking the television for me to see it...but that was OK. There was plenty of other scenery to take in, and I had the feeling this was going to be a night I should remember. I tried my best to memorize every view from my seat, to hold "the moment" in every way I could. The bite of the warm whiskey, the smell of cigarettes and cooling concrete, the shimmering of straight blonde hair under red neon--shouts from below, streets full of people having the time of their lives, or pretending to. I wondered how many of them knew that it was too good to last, and how many were, like me, trying to preserve some small piece of the magic before Monday mornings (and, in the long run, careers and parenthood) crushed it like a grape.

With about 15 minutes to go, Jim came back and gulped the last of the whiskey. "Come on, man, the manager wants to see us downstairs. Time to walk tall."

We met the manager, who ducked us into his office and offered Jim a bump from something in a brown vial. I declined, and leaned against the door while they began haggling over the bill.

I woke up in the car, with whiskey on my breath and a headache. It was dark, and it seemed like Jim was driving a thousand miles an hour.

I rubbed my eyes: "do we have enough gas to get home?"

"Yup."

"How did you pay for all that?"

"I told him the article'd be in the November issue. That way, we can go back down there for Halloween. The Eagles are in town then, I think. And this time, we're going."

Aides to the Ex President 7: The Roof

2005-03-04T12:54:00.000-08:00

I would have written this all early this week, had I not been stumped by trying to recall just exactly what sort of bullshit I'd laid on this poor girl. Perhaps when I'm feeling perverse and verbose, I'll go back and stick it in here, but for now, just the facts.

Jim and I sat back in that dark corner booth for the better part of two hours, sucking down Wild Turkey and whatever else they put in front of us; I kept trying to write, but my eyes refused to focus on the paper, and it was too dark to see what I was doing, anyway. But eventually, I guess, one of the two of us began to believe our own press--the matter of the dusty velvet rope was broached, our requirement of TOTAL COVERAGE, or at least a view of the West End, explained, and the manager summoned. Soon, unbelievably, Jim and I were ensconced on the roof of the place, at a glass topped table with a parasol sticking out of the middle of it. It was HOT, and we could never get the shade situation corrected, but nobody, especially the manager, batted an eye when I asked Jenna to start questioning her guests about whether any of them had attended the Lollapalooza show the night before. Soon, a trickle of people began to file up the stairs to sit at our table and be "interviewed."

I still can't believe, to this day, that we succeeded with this. All I can think was that there really was a sort of confluence of subcultural energy in Dallas that weekend, and the restaurant staff was hip to it, at least subconsciously.

And it had to have been subconsciously-if it was obvious, I can't help but think they're expect someone slightly more illustrious than a couple of wild eyed hopheads to come cover the event--but, as ridiculous as it seemed to me, everyone seemed to swallow our bullshit without batting an eye.

It was nearly sunset when I looked up and noticed a few things.

1) While we had the only table on the roof, few (if any) of the people I'd interviewed had gone back downstairs. The bar in this area was completely stripped of alcohol, and the entire thing was covered in a layer of fine Texas dust, so the only reason for these folks to be upstairs would be, well, us.

2) For some reason our Turkey and Cokes had been replaced with gin and tonics, which suited me fine because the day was rather hot. The parasol, the crowd below, and the general heat combined with my greatly stretched brain at this point, and something odd happened.

It's kind of hard to explain, but veteran psychonauts will probably back me up on this. Your mind sort of...splits in two, I guess. Your conscious mind knows and acts like you're in exactly the same reality that everyone else is in, albeit one that is substantially funnier and prone to breathe/melt/turn irridescent. Your subconscious mind, however, begins to make pretty erroneous assumptions about what's going on.

In this case, I knew I was wearing a black Jane's Addiction tshirt, khaki shorts, and ratty tennis shoes. However, when I wasn't looking at what I was wearing, and especially when I took a sip of my frosty beverage, my subconscious mind would dress me in a sort of white linen planter's suit--and instead of downtown Dallas, I was somewhere near the coast, in Mexico or Algiers. The post of the parasol would morph into a palm tree trunk, and the haze that shrouds downtown became, peripherally at least, a sandstorm. While this was infinitely cooler than being broke in Dallas and responsible for a rapidly growing bar tab, it was rather disconcerting. Even MORE disconcerting was

3) Jim was nowhere to be found. However, there was a commotion on the staircase, and the manager, by the door, was dividing his attention between staring at me and scanning the feet of the crowd, especially in the area of the still abandoned bar. I began to fret.

Aides to the Ex President 6: Gonzo Journalism

2005-02-28T18:06:00.000-08:00

[Like I said, I swear, these were our true motivations at the time.]

We grabbed a table as far away from the door as possible, which meant we were sitting in near total darkness. This was good for my brain and my eyes too. Soon, our server came back to greet us. She was, it seemed, not even as old as I was (and I wasn't even old enough to be in there), and pretty in that sorority house way that I quit being attracted to shortly after arriving at college a year or two before. But that's OK--the entire district was full of ball caps and bangs, so while Jim and I were out of place, it was no different from any sports bar anywhere else.

"What can I get you fellas?" she asked with a dazzling smile.

"Turkey and coke, and a Bass Ale," was Jim's reply. She nodded and began to bounce away.

"HEY! My friend here might want something to drink too!"

She turned and reappraised us.

Jim was well on his way to being the "two hundred pound bald man," and with very little sleep over the last couple of days, not to mention no shower, he was beginning to look rather...scruffy. And vaguely menacing, I realized later. I probably wasn't much better, despite all my attempts to catch her eye and smile reassuringly. While I was probably not what you would call "menacing," there was most likely something subtly wrong with me, but not in any way she was able to pin down.

"I'm sorry...Jenna...my friend's been on the road a bit too long. I'll take one of those as well."

"One of what?" she asked suspiciously, "a Turkey or a beer?"

Oh Jesus, I thought, I HATE Wild Turkey. But it was too late now; we had to get the upper hand on this situation quickly, otherwise we would get tossed before we even had a chance to run up a bill.

"Both," I said, with an inner wince.

She flounced away, Jim got up to go look up the stairs, which had bright Texas sunshine spilling down the steps, but suspiciously no traffic at all.

She brought us our drinks, and retreated to the bar, where she glanced at us nervously while talking to the bartender, who likewise inspected us. "This is going nowhere," I thought. "We're gonna get tossed. Maybe even go to jail. God, I don't want to go to jail in Dallas, I thought."

She approached again, directly to me, and smiled her most winning smile. In a matter of seconds, I thought, I was going to be carded and tossed. I finished my Turkey, and eyeballed the beer.

"What are those?" she asked, nodding at something on the table.

I looked down. In front of me were two yellow legal pads and a pencil. I didn't remember bringing them in, but there they were--covered with what might be euphemistically termed "notes." They were pretty sloppy, and interspersed with a number of decidedly odd doodlings, and she seemed pretty interested in them. For my part, I couldn't decide if I should hide them (because the notes were one part nonsense and two parts criminal confession) or dangle them as bait. My indecision operated in the latter choice's favor, of course, so she grabbed on of the notebooks and turned it her way. I could see the word "ACID" written on it.

Jim suddenly snapped out of a reverie and snapped "Aides to the Ex President, ma'am. Those documents are classified!" He snatched them up and wandered off to the bathroom, cursing and throwing baleful looks around the bar.

The waitress was utterly confused by his bizarre behavior, but instead of looking at the bar, she looked at me. I shrugged, and tried to keep my hands where she could see them.

"He's crazy," I said, "they always give me the crazy ones."

"What are you doing here?" she breathed, looking into my eyes. Could she be...flirting with me?

"Well, our cover story, as you just heard, is that we're Aides to the Ex President. Nixon, you know? But really, we're writers from Rolling Stone, and we're here to cover this fantastic weekend here in Dallas. You wouldn't have gone to Lollapalooza last night, would you?"

She'd gone rather unfocused pretty quickly after I said the words "Rolling Stone," and her jaw dropped a bit. I could see the tip of a very pink tongue, and the glint of pearly whites.

"Wow," she said, "Rolling Stone? You mean, like, the magazine?"

Yes, I replied, but I didn't want a whole lot of notice. While we needed Total Coverage, we were here on a shoestring budget and had, in fact, stayed up the entire night before because we couldn't find a hotel room. Thus, I said, my notes were rather garbled--that, and we'd talked to a number of freaks from the Lollapalooza show the day before. Did she know anyone who'd been there?

"Ummmm...what's that?" she asked, almost embarrassed. "I just moved here from White Settlement."

"I'll bet you did, honey," I thought, as Jim staggered back to the table.

She disappeared back to the bar, and returned shortly with more whiskey and beers. She sat down across from me, and began asking me questions about our "assignment."

Aides to the Ex President 5: Croc's

2005-02-22T09:11:00.000-08:00

[that old coot would have to shoot himself right before the climax of this story, wouldn't he? I swear, this is how it happened.]

The calories present in one can of Budweiser beer were sufficient for me to get one man out of bed, all of our gear packed, and Jim installed in the driver's seat. Shortly afterward, we arrived at one of those plastic breakfast places--the kind we generally got thrown out of at 2 in the morning, back home. Maybe that would have been the case in Dallas, except the sun was already shining and the whole place was covered with Lollapalooza rejects.

I had intended to spend some time taking notes, with the eventual goal of maybe writing about the events of the weekend (oh, to find those notes now). At the time, this proceeded as far as me bringing in a couple of pads of yellow legal paper, which did nothing more than burn my eyes and make me think of urine and canaries. I doodled aimlessly.

Jim, on the other hand, was chipper--after all, he'd had a four or five hour nap. We ordered food, and he began flirting with a couple of girls seated behind us.

They were kind of an odd pair, in my LSD-fugued brain. In retrospect, they reminded me of a Jim Morrison poem about meeting two women on a beach, blonde (Freedom) and dark (Enterprise). At the time, though, the blonde reminded me of Janis from the Muppet Show, and the other of a rather chubby Valerie Bertinelli. Like I said, a rather odd pair.

They had plainly been up most of the night as well, although from Janis' post nasal drip it wasn't the same type of night. Jim's enthusiasm was infectious, and soon all four of us were talking over the back of our booth.

Jim, of course, led in those conversations, as he still does. It's hard for me to reign in someone who so plainly loves to bullshit people, and my brain wasn't working too well. I stayed mostly in the background and concentrated on my sausage and eggs, until the girls asked where we were from.

"San Clemente, California," Jim replied (which was kind of true-he'd only recently returned from a visit to our friend Ed who was living out there).

Now, most of you kids don't know this, but the most famous resident of San Clemente back in the early 90's (and even the 70's and 80's, come to think of it) was Richard Nixon. Jim has a bit of a Nixon fetish, so Ed had shown him the walls of the estate (complete, as legend has it, with a spiked fence 100 yards out into the ocean). I knew this, and I knew what was next.

"California," the girls breathed, wide eyed. "Like, wow! What do you do out there?"

"Aides to the Ex President," I barked. "Why do you ask?"

The girls were confused and aroused--they had no idea what I was talking about, but it sure beat going home to Denton. Jim took it and ran, as I got up to visit the bathroom.

"Well, see, Jefe's been driving a long time, so he's kinda touchy. We're part of the advance team for Richard Nixon, who's thinking about running for Governor of Texas. It's all very hush-hush--he shouldn't have said anything."

They were still nodding sagely as I slid back into my side of the booth.

"You girls know where we can get a beer in this town? The last place we stopped at didn't have any. What's this 'dry county' business, anyway?"

They giggled nervously, and Valerie looked around for a clock. Or a cop. "West End," they said.

I softened my demeanor--there were serious dealings afoot, but none of them precluded having a couple of hipster chicks along for the ride. And this Ex-President thing could turn into something worthwhile (it never did, and he died two years later).

Jim, however, didn't ask them to come along--apparently he'd caught the whiff of a lunchtime beer, or was beginning to obsess on the football game that night, but after a bit more confused dialogue and nervous glances in my direction, they paid their tab and left.

Jim was beginning to be concerned about our money situation, recognizing that we barely had enough money to get home, much less get into a damn Dallas Cowboys football game. I knew what we were going to do, but convincing him that we'd be better off watching the game on television in some sports bar (which was, itself, a compromise for me--the BEST place I could think of to watch it would be in my own living room) was a task far beyond my mental capacity at the time. Besides, a dark place was something I needed--consequently, I coaxed him into finding a bar, and we split for downtown Dallas shortly thereafter.

West End Dallas is a hellhole of malls, boutiques, and restaurants. It's like Bricktown in OKC, 6th Street in Austin, and the Riverwalk in San Antonio. For those of you not familiar with the above, imagine the love child of the East Village and McDonalds, or the Waterfront in SF and, say, Gap Clothing. It's horrifying to me now, but when we finally found the place, I looked on it as a prime place to fuck with people. Maybe create our own Temporary Autonomous Zone--or at least get our drinks for free. The Aides to the Ex President line had given me an idea, and I was intent on finding out how far we could go before I crashed, or we were arrested.

The restaurant we chose was a place called "Croc's," or some variant thereof. We chose it simply because it was the only one that had a dining area on the roof. This would give us a stellar view of the whole West End, which was pretty packed due to the game in a few hours, and the events of the preceding nights. We sat down at the bar with $25.00 between us, about half of which was needed to fill my gas tank. Time to put up or shut up, I thought, Thompson would demand TOTAL COVERAGE, which meant a rooftop seat. And there was a red velvet rope across the staircase. The rope, I noted, was dusty.

He Stomped On The Terra

2005-02-21T10:32:00.000-08:00

Hunter S. Thompson: "No mas, no mas."

I'm saddened beyond words to hear that Dr. Gonzo has taken his own life. While I believe it's someone's right to make the decision as to whether they live or die, it's still hard for me reconcile the man I looked up to for years for his lust for life with the tired old man who blew his brains out yesterday.

I started reading HST by purest chance: at age 14 or 15, I joined QPB, which was (or maybe still is, who knows) a sort of literary Columbia House. You got six books, I think, and promised to buy 3 more over the next three years. One of those books happened to be Generation of Swine. It was the best of the lot-in fact, I can't recall any of the other titles at all. I gave it to my dad to take on a business trip to Israel, and he came back a fan as well--his words were "I laughed out loud, in the airport. And you haven't SEEN funny looks until you start laughing out loud, alone, in an Israeli airport."

So if my political persona was in large part shaped by Generation of Swine and Campaign Trail 72 (how many 15 year old boys do you know who can rattle off the Democratic contenders for the '72 campaign?), my greater feelings of freedom to live my life the way I wanted to were probably formed by The Great Shark Hunt and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Coming out of small town Oklahoma, I was consistently impressed that this guy was not only able to get away with the things he was, but was able to make a fine living doing so. It gave me hope (in a very stressful time of my life) that you didn't have to follow the same road everyone else did.

HST was one of my idols, perhaps even more so than Buk or Bill Burroughs. News of his death last night was stunning--I just sat there for a few minutes, at a loss.

I wonder what was going through his mind--I wouldn't be surprised to hear he'd been diagnosed with cancer, or some other terminal disease. I'm disappointed to learn that he's gone out like the rest of us do, instead of sublimated directly to Hell or just plain disappearing--but the world is a much less colorful place without him in it.

I think this weekend, I rob a liquor store and go get a tattoo somewhere. I've been leery of getting HST related tattoos on both arms, but there's no question in my mind now.

Res Ipsa Loquitor, Doctor Thompson. You are missed.

Aides to the Ex President 4: A Single Beer

2005-02-11T09:51:00.000-08:00

Shortly after 2am, Jim turned on the television. The Egg had begun to pall, and we didn’t have much to amuse ourselves with, so we settled in to watch a Woody Allen flick.

The film is called “Sleeper,” and it’s hysterical. Now, many people don’t like Mr. Allen, and don’t think he’s funny. I’m certainly not a part of the cult, but still, I could see why the cult exists.

Liz, incidentally, found him distasteful because he always wrote himself in as getting the girl, which plainly a man of his looks and characteristics could never really do. She also felt he was something of a misogynist, I think, although I never really got too far in that with her.

Anyway, it’s a sort of “Brave New World” spoof where Woody (or his character) awakens in the 24th Century (or some other time far in the future) to find that health food has been determined bad for you, and that basically the whole planet has no problems at all. Given his reaction, I guess the point of the film is that some people aren’t happy unless there’s some aspect of their lives which sucks.

The next film, which Jim never saw, was “Some Like it Hot.”

I liked that one too, and with my acid-influenced perceptions thought all the cross dressing stuff was absolutely subversive. It put me in mind of the old bastard who taught my typing class in high school, who opined weekly about the creeping into the mainstream of homosexuality. “First,” he’d say, “it was just down there in one corner. Now, it’s everywhere you look!” And given that this was small town Oklahoma (small enough that we didn’t have a stoplight), we were all a little confused about what programs he was watching. Mr. Morris is now a personality archetype for one of the most entertaining folks out there, the Apocalypse Nut. And while I’ll admit that California has a lot of these types, Oklahoma has some real gems (a couple of years later, I met a set of twins whose father pulled them out of school once or twice a year for the Rapture, I suppose to make sure they didn’t miss the bus or something).

Sometime around dawn, I went outside to watch the sun come up.

I used to hate seeing the sun come up, because that generally meant I was a) already up preparing to do some sort of horrible country chore, or b) already up and in some duck blind, cold and wet. It wasn’t until my first semester of college that I realized you could wring a lot more satisfaction from a sunrise by actually staying up all night the night before. Even without acid, the right crew on an all nighter can be worthwhile.

But all the heavy thinking from this specific night (I won’t go into it, except that a lot of it had to do with the tatters my relationship with Alethea was in), I was content to see the dawn. Once the sky begins to brighten to the east, I have several feelings:

1) I’ve survived this drug yet again.
2) Sunrises denote a new day, a chance to act on all the things discussed the night before (or at least, examine them under different light, mentally speaking).
3) A general feeling of superiority to folks that have actually been to bed. Many of them are getting up to go to work, or otherwise prepare for a day of stricture and stifling conformity. I was free, in other words, and had all day to play.

I also felt completely drained and enervated. Nothing to eat all night, body burning fuel like nobody’s business (LSD causes tightening of the muscles all over the body, but worst in the neck and back, in my experience), and nothing to do but grit my teeth for the last 3 or 4 hours. I was at, I felt, a zero point.

And it was precisely at that point that the guys in the next room came up the stairs again. They could tell I was on acid, I think, and I had the impression they were wondering if I’d spent the entire night outside, jumping off the second floor railing. They entered their room, and one of them returned and said “dude, you want a beer?”

It was one of those unconscious acts of kindness that words can’t describe. One of those casual, quickly forgotten, almost automatic gestures which garner one more good karma than you can burn in a lifetime. Of course I wanted a beer, but through the long night of spiritual discovery, cross dressing jazz musicians, and wobbling, amorphous black eggs, I’d forgotten that such a thing as beer existed.

Not only was it beer, but the can, as he handed it to me, was cold and beaded with icewater. No measly refrigerator for THIS—it was plainly From A Cooler, which means this beer had Been Places. As if the extra work done to keep its temperature low could be extracted from the can and used to fuel my body, since we were only halfway through this trip.

I don’t recall speaking any more with the guys next door—they were in the process of checking out, I think, and I didn’t bother them. I greedily cracked open the can, and took a sip. The taste was pure bliss, of course, but as I sat there, cross legged in the warm Dallas sunshine, I could actually feel the energy being pulled out of the malted barley and transferred to my hungry cells. I drank it all, savoring each mouthful, and once the can was empty, went inside to wake Jim.

Corrections

2005-02-11T07:52:00.000-08:00

Let me tell you about a little moral tug of war that I've been having with myself recently:

After getting 3 posts into Aides to the Ex President, I realized that my time frame was all fucked up. Not sure why, other than it happened 13 years ago and I'm an idiot, but since we only spent 2 days in Dallas, and the Dallas/Washington game was on a Sunday, then we must have spent SATURDAY night tripping, not Friday.

Thus, this story is about a third shorter than you were probably thinking it would be, which will most likely be a relief.

But the quandary in which I found myself is this: do I confess the error, or do I go back and edit the original post, and play dumb?

Obviously, the former, but a little more info: First, it would be duplicitous, and while I'm perfectly capable of being duplicitous, it's generally for a lot better reason than to hide a stupid error I've made. Second, this is an acid story, and that puts me in mind of a lot of the elaborate paranoid schemes my mind thinks up during those times. I know it wouldn't be the same to you, but still, it's mean. Third, I realized that I've been putting off writing another part of the story because of indecision about what to do, so it doesn't matter that much more anyway.

So, problem solved. If I stay in tonight, I'll endeavor to write another post. I'll have to do some thinking about it, because with Jim asleep, there's not a whole lot more action til the following morning, other than a lot of really heavy thinking and a few televised movies. Which is generally what happens when you take acid alone, come to think of it, if you're fortunate enough to have a television with cable.

Aides to the Ex President 3: The Egg

2005-02-04T08:30:00.000-08:00

I think it was Aldous Huxley who pointed out that hallucinogens take away the filters our mind sets up to allow us to function in a meaningful way. These filters are what allow us to distinguish between a cow wandering in our direction, and a Greyhound bus. Important things, filters, but at times it's interesting to turn them off.

Thus, it's possible to spend hours staring at your face in the bathroom, which is the worst possible thing you can do if you have self-image problems (or don't, and want to keep it that way). It doesn't take very long to realize that skin is gross, and by extension, humanity is gross. Don't worry, it makes sense. And heaven forbid you look at your EYEBALLS. There's something unnatural about them--naturally, the pupils are blown, but if you make the mistake of really looking at them, you realize that your eyes are actually pressurized balls of fluid (not unlike grapes), and your pupil is really a HOLE IN YOUR EYEBALL. Some experts also warn there's a very real danger of actually falling into your own pupils, which I've never done, although I think I've come close a time or two.

As a rule of thumb, it's best to just stay away from the bathroom if possible. However, nature will generally call at some point during your technicolor dream theater, so it's OK then. But keep your eyes tightly closed, and try to develop what Rachel (or Aleister Crowley) will probably have a name for, but I do not. It's the skill that longtime trippers have of absorbing all, but focusing on nothing inordinately. Come to think of it, this is actually forcing your reality filters back into place to a degree, for a time, but I like it better if someone can come up with the proper metaphysical term for it.

But enough about bathrooms and bodily functions. Onward to The Egg.

The hotel room was mostly white, and other than the beds and television, there was a sort of desk or credenza built into the wall. Said credenza was of crappy construction, of thin particleboard laminated with white plastic. All in all, something not worth a second look. And it wouldn't have been looked at twice, except if we decided to break it, if the floor hadn't been carpeted.

The Egg is a highly polished bolus of stone which fell from the sky aeons ago, as Cthulhu was first bound into his watery prison off the coast of Indonesia. Bloody is the history of its passing through the ages, and mystery shrouds the extradimensional space from which it came. Its coloration is black as the void, and it is curiously cold to the touch. It is also, obviously, eggshaped.

I don't know why I took it with me that day. I had a vague feeling that it might be useful as a triptoy, or worry stone, or something-but as soon as I saw that white, cheapass credenza, I knew we were in for a long night.

See, acid also fucks with your mind in the visual cognition department (I'm probably butchering clinical language, so please correct me if I'm misusing a term), so when something moves through your field of vision, it leaves behind slight images of itself in the air, just long enough for your mind to recognize something's there, but not precisely what it is. These are called "tracers," and if you're reading this on a Microsoft OS, you can go to your mouse settings and make your very own. It's crude, and annoying after a while, because it's obviously the same stupid white arrow, but when it's all over the place, it can be very...impressive.

Imagine everything you see being some sort of optical illusion, and you've got an idea.

Tracers, furthermore, aren't just where an object is, they're where you think the object will go. This quality has developed into a game called "Dope Ball," in which two or more people sort of twiddle their fingers, in the manner of someone casually shaking a pair of dice. If done properly, there's the illusion of something actually there, that is, the Dope Ball. Once everyone agrees that yes, there is a Dope Ball, the person holding the Ball will throw it, and since the mind has conceived of an object, the movement of the thrower's hand will present the optical illusion of that object moving through space.

It's an absolutely ridiculous game, of course, but loads of fun at the time.

The reason I'm going into so much detail about how LSD affects your brain is because most of what goes on during an acid trip is completely pointless and dumb to someone who's not tripping.

So The Egg, being black, contrasted nicely (or absolutely, come to think of it) with the dead white plastic of the desk. Idly, I rolled The Egg around, and noted a serious rumble accompanying its movements (due to the acoustics of the desk). A toy was born, and in short order, we were spinning The Egg like a top, listening to the vibrating rumble from various points around the desk--underneath, directly above, ear pressed to desk, etc..

I told you it looked stupid.

Then, we noticed something. The Egg, being symmetric along its long axis, and being of uniform color, did not appear to be rotating at all. The noise was leading us to believe that it was rotating, but once the sound was eliminated (by means of a pillow on my knees, jammed underneath the desk), the illusion of an egg wandering around under its own power was hypnotizing.

And then, it happened. The Egg melted.

It didn't actually melt, of course--it just quit rotating. And as it quit rotating, it spun down, from point to side, where it spun for a second and stopped.

We were both silent. Jim picked it up and spun it again, wordlessly. We both put our heads on the desk and watched.

It occurred to me that the Egg, when properly viewed, was Schroedinger's Cat. I'm not going to explain the theory, except to say that during a specific period of time, the cat was in an indeterminate state, a state between alive and dead. You can't judge the state of the cat without seeing it, which is prevented by an ingenious device (which also has a fun feature of killing the cat at some random point). Anyway, the theory isn't about acid heads with stone eggs, or even about cats, but my thoughts were that:

1) if you accept that The Egg was not rotating, but standing on its tip

2) if The Egg suddenly begins to change shape (that is, grow shorter and fatter), then ultimately

3) comes to rest as a different Egg, well, then a number of things happen.

First, you've got a king hell Egg on your hands. Kinda like that singin' frog in the Bugs Bunny cartoons. Second, in the intermediate state b), it's producing more tracers than I've ever seen in one place, all dead black against a white background, which is the best way to play with tracers, which, after all are visual snipes. And finally, you can kill a HELL of a lot of time with this party trick.

We spent, quite literally, two hours watching this thing and turning it over in our minds. One and a half hours was spent with the shape changing bit, then and extra half hour was spent arguing about whether it was, in fact, completely dead black. It's not. There's a faint metallic gold sheen in one part of it, which exists even when we're not completely out of our minds on acid.

I've still got the thing. Up until I moved into a house that had carpeting, and reduced my acid taking to a couple of weeks in the desert each year, I brought it out with every trip, and blew a lot of people's minds with it. Currently, it's resting in a kitchen drawer at home, so saturated with LSD sweat that even I'm afraid to touch it.

At about 3am, Jim decided to crash, so I turned on the TV to see what sort of rubbish I could rot my brain with before dawn, and the beginning of our second day in Dallas.

Aides to the Ex President 2: Hair Bat

2005-01-26T07:35:00.000-08:00

Soon enough, the acid began to kick in, and Jim became paranoid about smoking in our room, due to his obsession with the fire sprinklers mounted on the ceiling.

Thus, we sat outside, on the railing, and watched the sun go down. It was a spectacular sunset, as you can imagine, despite the fact that we were in a North Dallas strip mall wasteland, facing north, with a rather crappy looking cottonwood tree blocking our view to the west. We didn’t care—we were young men out to have a good time in a new city, a city which was going to be full of people like us for the entire weekend. We were well fed (there was a Burger King a couple of miles away), there was plenty of ice, and we were tripping our balls off. Times were good.

After a few minutes of this, a troop of guys appeared and began fooling with the lock of the room next to ours. They were obviously Lollapalooza people, so we struck up a conversation, and it didn’t take us long to discover we all lived within a few miles of each other back in Oklahoma City. This is just the sort of thing that takes on grave personal meaning when you’re on acid, so I was looking forward to spending the evening getting to know them. They wanted to get something to eat first, so we directed them to the Burger King and resumed staring into the drainage ditch across the parking lot.

When I decided to start jumping off the balcony, it was about eight o’clock. Still daylight, but you could tell with your eyes closed that it would be dark soon.

Now, this is the second story of a motel—not a huge distance to fall, but still not something that’s particularly safe to do, especially when in the grip of serious hallucinogens. However, I was in good shape, and more importantly, I was bored. Jim was muttering something about “dangerous” and “cops,” but also something about needing more ice, so I decided it would be better for him if I waited til he was gone with the ice bucket. It didn’t take long.

The balcony (which wasn’t really a balcony, but rather an upper deck that allowed access to all the upper story rooms) was situated, as I’ve said, over an asphalt parking lot. Between the asphalt parking lot and the concrete of the sidewalk around the lower rooms was a strip of grass between 18” and 24” wide. This was my aiming point. I squatted up on the railing, bounced on the balls of my feet a couple of times, and leaped.

My shoes sank a few inches into the turf, but I was spot on with my landing and didn’t even need to catch myself. My heart rate was up, and my mind seemed to be working at a much higher level. I began to think that while actually FLYING was impossible, there was still a hell of a lot of telemetry to be analyzed by merely falling. This bore further investigation, and quickly (it’s easy to get distracted).

By the time I reached the jumping off point again, Jim was back, and mixing a drink in a plastic tumbler. I suggested he’d be safer, from a mixing point of view, if he took the plastic wrapper off of it, and while he was in the bathroom restructuring I took another leap. Thump, right into the footprints of the previous jump. I was making quite a dent, and elected to move over a couple of feet.

It was hard for me to concentrate on numbers, because of all the changes in sensation going on at the time. First, watching for police was important, and complicated by the red lights at intersections up the street. Second, there really wasn’t a lot of room for me to land safely, and while physics tells us that once you’re in the air, it doesn’t REALLY matter what you’re thinking, I spent a lot of time (relatively speaking) keeping track of my limbs and center of gravity to make sure I didn’t wind up with a fucked up ankle. Finally, everything was so pretty—the trash filled field behind the fence and drainage canal had taken on a mellow evening glow, and even the car exhaust off of 35E was a pungent and authentic elegy for people going places and doing things.

So, back to the railing. Jim was there, and I couldn’t think of any way to run him off, so I caught my breath and talked to him a bit about what I was doing. Since he’s nearly as big an idiot as I was, I soon had him convinced that this wasn’t a big deal, and NEARLY had him convinced to try it himself. He drew the line at that, since one of us was going to have to drive to the hospital, and at this point we weren’t even really sure where our car was, much less where the nearest emergency room was.

I eased back up on the railing and jumped again, with the same result. I became fascinated with how deeply my feet were sinking into the earth with each jump, and wondered if the place might have a grubworm problem.

Jim was hiding in the room when I came back up, and declared that on his latest trip to the ice bin he’s seen a massive woman in flower-dotted spandex beating a child with a hairbrush. He refused to come out, under any circumstances, and warned me that it was just a matter of time til they came for me.

While this is indubitably true, I wasn’t too concerned about it at the time. I sat down on one of the beds, poured a drink, and described the results of the latest jump to him. This piqued his interest, and soon we had gone out to investigate these footprints, as well as confront his child-beating Divine.

Divine was nowhere in evidence, and the footprints were, of course, just footprints, and it was getting dark. We headed back to the room, Jim back to his usual jovial self. He told me that on my next jump, I should leave my hair down, instead of in the ponytail I was accustomed to. This seemed like a capital idea, and Jim was vastly amused by the picture it presented on my next jump.

“Man,” he said, “you looked like a goddamned hair bat jumpin’ off there!”

By this time it was nearly dark, and I was tired. I took another drink of whiskey, and decided that one final jump was in order.

[cue the music with which to foreshadow doom]

I guess I wasn’t paying much attention to my surroundings. Maybe I was more interested in the additional drag on my hair. For whatever reason, I didn’t see the car coming until I was actually in the air.

It was a fairly new sedan of some sort, silver/gray, and it was pulling into the parking spot directly in front of where I would land. My feet touched the ground just as the driver came to a halt. He’d ruined my perfect streak of landings, because as I landed I fell forward, hard, and slammed my hands down on the hood of his car. He looked up from his seat belt, saw me, and without a word backed out and drove away. Jim was laughing hysterically, of course, and I made for the room with the quickness.

Once we were safely ensconced in our room, and I was sure my hands weren’t broken, it was kind of amusing. Picture this: you’re an old encyclopedia salesman, tired from a long day of knocking on people’s doors, and ready for a room and a drink. As you pull in to your accustomed spot, a bare chested, long haired, Charles Manson lookin’ FREAK appears from literally out of nowhere and starts beating on the hood of your car. I don’t know who was more scared.

The guys from the room next door didn’t come back, or at least, didn’t knock on our door, so sometime after dark we started playing with The Egg.

Aides to the Ex President 1: Fuck a Wine Product

2005-01-25T07:49:00.000-08:00

Sorry, kids, I know you wanted to hear more about cheap wine, but really, there's not much of a story there. The Upshot:

We drank a lot of Boone's Farm, eventually reaching the 4 minute mile mark of 17 seconds. I got older, started to get heartburn, and had to give it up.

I started that one because Rachel asked for it. I've since learned my lesson about that. Here's one that Rachel's sister wanted to see.

The summer of 92 was, as I've previously written, kind of a crazy one. I was struggling through a relationship, my first BIG, ADULT relationship, and working a lot of hours to make ends meet. All in all, it wasn't working out.

So what did I do? I took a vacation.

In September, there was a perfect storm of sorts brewing down in Dallas. Friday was the second Lollapalooza tour, the one featuring all those grunge bands who made Starbucks what it is today. Saturday was (according to Jim) some sort of big stadium rock show, most likely some Van Halen or Metallica thang. Finally, Sunday was the Dallas/Washington football game, which wasn't of real interest to me but was a sort of cultural touchstone for Jim. Thus, I got the day off work, and we were going to spend the weekend in Dallas.

As usual, things got off to a rocky start. Alethea did everything she could to prevent me from going, from oral sex to throwing crockery to crying, which was completely shocking to me as we had agreed a couple of weeks previously that she was going to stay home and work (her job at the time was kind of a weekend thing, or shift thing, so this made sense). Jim sat calmly on the porch, drank Hamms, and read the paper. As a result of all this, instead of leaving at 7am, we didn't hit the highway til nearly 4pm.

It was a beautiful day for a road trip. We had a 12 pack of Hamm's Black Label, a quart of Jim Beam, and six hits of acid. Oh, and about a hundred dollars between us. Times were good.

By the time we hit the Dallas metroplex, however, some realities were starting to sink in for me. First, we had no tickets to any of these events, and our cash situation wasn't anywhere close to sufficient for both of us to attend to begin with. Furthermore, we didn't even know where two of the events were being held (and frankly, I have my doubts that the buttrock show was even going on).

A quandary. Upon thinking about it, we were proactive enough to find a hotel quickly, some sort of LaQuinta or Red Roof Inn or somethin' like that, out in the wastelands of north Denton. We checked in, got a room on the second floor, and dropped our acid, just as the sun was going down.

Boone's Farm 2: Wine Product

2005-01-18T06:44:00.000-08:00

After a few weekends sitting on the porch watching the grass grow, I realized that it's really difficult to actually get drunk on Boone's Farm. I didn't mind that--it was like drinking Kool Aid all night long, except sweeter and slightly carbonated (yes, these wines have a screw top). Jim, however, was (and still is) prone to...ahem...push the envelope.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The first thing that endeared Boone's to me was that there were about 10 different flavors, all named like detergents. I didn't notice it until just now, but to me, different names meant a different flavor. And since my attention span is basically non existent, I NEED different flavors if I'm going to be drinking what is essentially the same damn wine product all night long.

Sad to say, I can't recall the names of my favorite one. There was a sort of second generation of wine product back then, in retrospect very specifically geared for girls with too much self respect than to walk around with an actual wine cooler OR be caught dead with a bottle of Mad Dog/Night Train/Thunderbird.

On a side note, did you know that Night Train was referenced (either by drinking or actually mentioning) five times in the Blues Brothers movie? Yup.

Anyway, by the end of the summer Jim and I were racing to see who could finish a bottle of this stuff first. He won, always, because I just never figured out the technique, and even at $1.80 a bottle I wasn't too interested in running out early. But we fiddled around with it, making the sort of arbitrary but necessary rules that became such a part of the Land Speed Record (as it was soon dubbed) mythos.

Then came the road trip to New York, which story has done been told (I think all you regulars were on board for that one, but you can find it in the archives if you don't remember it), and upon my return I was broke enough that I didn't have any CHOICE but to drink the Boone's, and I had every reason to get just as trashed as I could.

The following spring I had managed to dig myself out of the emotional pit that I'd been in, thanks in large part to Daniel-san and a few cute girls. I was back in school, had met a crop of new people, and was in general having a good time with life again. We also ate a lot of acid back then, and since LSD didn't react well with sweet, carbonated wines like Boone's, I backed off of that in favor of big jugs of Rhine Flur wines and a lot of Jim Beam.

But the Boone's would still come out on special occasions, and actually developed into a kind of party game--two 3 person teams would compete, and the winners, well, they won. During that summer, we slowly whittled away at the record, approaching what I felt was the asymptotic time of 20 seconds.

And then, at the end of the summer, a bunch of rather unpleasant stuff happened, and I found myself basically alone once more. I went from 3 roommates to zero in less than a month, and I found that the money I'd been giving one of my roommates for rent hadn't been making it to the landlady, so I was in pretty deep with her (in fact, if the house hadn't rented for $200 a month, I probably would have been homeless).

This was the winter of the Story of Kim, the winter of bad poetry and very weird women and a general feeling that winter just wasn't going to be my season. Boone's farm dropped off the radar, because there WERE no special events, and I was too broke to care anyway.

Then I met Lexi.

Boone's Farm 1: The Great Coup of 92

2005-01-11T11:53:00.000-08:00

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.

Under The Weather

2005-01-04T12:41:00.000-08:00

Promise I haven't forgotten about this--the holidays, travel, and a persistent pain in me gulliver have prevented me from even THINKING about starting something new, but I have no intention of leaving this alone for much longer. Keep checking back, folks. Thanks.

Dreams of a Novel

2004-12-21T09:31:00.000-08:00

I tend to have really weird dreams--dreams that I seem to wake up from and fall right back into when I fall asleep. This one seemed to last for a long time, although it's kind of hard to say for sure, but it got me thinking about another writing project. A big one.

It was a dream intense enough to make me want to get out of bed, actually, but laziness did prevail, as well as the knowledge that I'll probably be up for all of tonight and tomorrow as well (we're billing again, which was supposed to be done tonight, but I just don't see it happening). Now it's gone, for the most part, as is my motivation. 'Swhat I get for eating egg foo yung right before bed.

Goodbye, Skidmark

2004-12-17T14:33:00.000-08:00

Our chemical applicator quit this morning. This is a good thing, don't worry, because he's one of two people here who consistently get on my nerves just by opening their mouths. He's mindbogglingly stupid, which is kind of scary considering you have to be certified by the state to spray pesticides.

Dude is dumb. I mean, wow. I can't stress this enough, I can only give examples:

Two months ago, we sent him to cut down and spray a vacant lot. "Take a weedeater," we said, "and cut everything down before you spray it with Roundup." Off he went, across town, and arrived at this vacant lot with very little issue (this is a point for him, actually, but I digress). Then, as if he's used up every single ounce of common sense that he had, he just sort of mentally shut down.

Skidmark: "Jeff, this gate is locked."

Me: "Are you sure it's locked? It's never been locked before."

Skidmark: "It's locked."

Me: "OK, go next door to the grocery store (which is actually a small Asian supermarket) and find Tri. He'll unlock it for you."

Skidmark: "..."

After about fifteen minutes of fruitless efforts to get him in the right door (really, folks, there are three things on that street: Tri's shop, Tri's lot, and a post office, in order from west to east. It's not rocket science.), I relented and called Tri.

Me: "Hi, Tri, would you mind stepping out and unlocking the gate for Skidmark?"

Tri: "Hi Jeff, it should be unlocked."

Me: "Well, our guy says there's a lock on it."

Tri: "Yes, there is a lock on it, but it's dummy locked."

Me: "That would explain it. Thanks!"

[dummy locked, incidentally, is a technical term for when a padlock -looks- locked, but isn't actually snapped shut. Effectively, it looks locked if you're driving by at 10 mph, or, as the name implies, a dummy.]

Me: "Cory, Tri says it's not locked. It looks locked, but it's really not."

Skidmark: "..."

Me: "Got that?"

Skidmark: "Oh yeah, man, it looked locked."

15 minutes passes.

Skidmark: "Hey Jeff, I, uh, I forgot my sprayer."

Great.

Two weeks later, he pulled out his spray hose about fifty feet, then got back in the truck to radio me that it was raining. Indeed, it was raining, so I told him to "pack it up and come in." He did the latter, but forgot to roll up his hose, resulting in the loss of a spray gun and fifty feet of high pressure spray hose.

A few days after that, he somehow got his spray hose wrapped around one of the side mirrors on the truck, pulled it off, and then drove over it when he left.

I could go on, but I won't.

Why am I calling him Skidmark? Why is he no longer here?

About a week ago, he called me on the phone, from his cellphone. This is not SOP, so I was already pissed at him because it meant, in his case, that he'd fucked up. Sure enough, he didn't want to talk to me, he wanted to talk to my boss, the owner. Now, while the Man was here, I wasn't about to turn the phone over (after all, I -am- the GM here. Anything you tell him you can tell me, right?), so after a little hemming and hawing, we had the following exchange:

Me: "What do you want, man? We're busy here."

Skidmark: "I, uh, I need to go home and change my, uh, underwear."

Me: "..."

Skidmark: "Don't tell anyone, OK? It's kinda embarrassing."

Me: "Yeah, definitely."

Well, shit (couldn't resist, sorry); I can not tell just about everyone, but there's no way in hell I can't tell the Man. I mean, it's his company, right? And it's not like I can actually not tell anyone, right? C'mon. I'm human.

Unfortunately, my boss's humor runs strong towards dick jokes and farting, so on Monday or Tuesday of this week, he replaced Cory's name on his daily list with "Hershey." Classy, huh? Hey, whatever--if it makes the guy easier to get along with, I'm all for it. Cory didn't bat an eye, all week.

Last night, I got the Man to change his name to "Skidmark." Again, I'm weak willed when it comes to this sort of stuff, especially when I can't stand the guy to begin with.

This morning, ol' Skidmark got extremely bent out of shape at me about the whole thing, called me a motherfucker, and gave his two weeks notice. The Man, who happened to be nearby, decided to play it to the hilt (I think he really feels bad when I get screamed at, for some reason) and basically terminated the guy on the spot. Sweet.

So sayonara, Skidmark. Take it on the heel and toe. Bring me back my spray boots (this guy couldn't even remember to change SHOES after a day of spraying), take yer goddamn headphones, and dangle. And if I get some sort of unemployment bullshit from yer ass, I'll make sure everyone at the agency knows your sphincter doesn't work.

As a result of this, all the other slackers we've got here (and there are many) have all been on their best behavior today, which unfortunately won't last through the end of next week. Ah well. Maybe I'll fire La Gallina, just to finish off the year right.

Story of Kim 9: Epilogue

2004-12-14T08:02:00.000-08:00

I don't think I've ever been so glad to get to the end of one of these things, kids, which means I've got to think long and hard before I start another one. This is a story that "Edward" and I still tell periodically, and I'll probably have to take some shit about next time I see him, so expect some changes if you're unfortunate enough to reread this here in about six months.

What happened to Kim? She's still around--I actually came very close to getting in a fistfight with her new boyfriend several years ago over the whole situation. I suppose she's still got some hard feelings.

She actually paged me several times over the months after this story took place, wanting to be "friends" and wanting to know if I was "still mad at her." Truthfully, I'm not mad at her. I really couldn't get too pissed at her, even at the time--she just didn't know how to deal with drunk lunatics like Edward and me. Out of her element, you might say--she should have stuck with pot smoking grunge dudes, who seem to lack the dark angry streak Ministry and Skinny Puppy elicit from us so well. And, in the end, I think she did.

Tiffany would be the logical next choice for this blog, if a) I wasn't sick of these kinds of stories, and b) I didn't genuinely still like Tiffany, despite all the weirdness the intervening years has brought us. I still see her, in other words.

Janiece was a real piece of work, whose story is a cautionary one to all of us. I'd list the morals of her story for you, but since it hasn't been told yet, perhaps I shouldn't. It wouldn't make any sense anyway.

I guess, since my life seems to revolve around sex and drugs, and I'm all tired of sex, I could go back to find some sort of tale of my halcyon days living with "Jim," back when we bought acid from the gay hairdressers next door. Hmmm...

I'm also getting to the point where I've forgotten exactly what I've written, or touched on--for instance, the gay hairdresser thing also involves my relationship with Becky, AKA Janice, but I know I've written about her somewhat, so I need to go back and reread a lot of this stuff.

Hell, I got my ticket info in the mail from the Burning Man people yesterday--perhaps I should spend the rest of the year cleaning up the Burning Man 2000 saga, and see if they want it. I don't know. Let me know what you think.

Story of Kim 8: Edward's Journey

2004-12-08T11:20:00.000-08:00

When I answered the door, I was met with a curt nod and request to pay back the money Edward had loaned me the night before. We drove to the ATM, Edward plainly pissed the fuck off and me wishing I had never, ever gotten involved in this. After I got him his money, we drove around for a bit, picked up some beer, and discussed the matter.

Edward was hacked off at me because I wouldn't take him home the night before, and most likely a large part of that was the way I told him I wasn't going to take him. But once that was out in the open, we decided to grab some breakfast and talk it over, so off we headed for New Orleans Cafe.

Where Kim was currently eating breakfast. Shit. I didn't need this--I barely managed to restrain Edward from leaping from my vehicle and doing god knows what to either her vehicle or her person, but in the end we made it out of the parking lot and headed over to the Chinese restaurant, which always seemed to be open. We ate noodles at 10am, drank Budweiser from cans, and caught up on the events of the night before.

It's never been clear to me why Edward leaped from her car in the first place, except that she was annoying the shit out of him. That's enough for me, generally, and Edward's a little less tolerant of bullshit than I am.

Anyway, after he walked back to my place, he actually tried to go to sleep on the couch, but was mad about the whole situation and wanted to go home. So he started walking.

[The whole family has a weird tendency to go for volksmarches, drunk, in the middle of the night or early in the morning. His brother Don does it all the fucking time, several times with me in tow.]

I lived a couple of miles off the highway at that time, so it was a simple matter of turning left at the driveway and turning left again at the onramp, then straight on til morning. But like I said, cops don't like drunk, underage pedestrians here, so it was simpler than it sounds.

Sure enough, Edward said, a cop pulled up beside him before he'd gone a mile up the highway.

"What's the story?" asked the cop.

Edward looked over at him, cold, hungover, and pissed. "Walkin' home."

"Yeah?" replied the cop, "you been drinkin'?"

"Uh huh, I just found out my best friend fucked my girlfriend, so I'm walking home from his house."

"Women trouble, huh? Where you live?"

"Edmond."

"Get in the car, I'll give you a ride home."

And the fucking cop DID! Or, strictly speaking, gave him a ride to the Edmond city limits, which was only a mile from Don's place, so he woke Don and got a ride back to his house, where he jumped in his car and drove straight back to mine.

How can you not love a story like that? He didn't seem too mad at me anymore, either, so we grabbed a couple of six packs of Primo and sat out on the front porch for a few hours, watching the sun climb and the leaves fall across the street.

Story of Kim 7: No Sleep At All

2004-12-04T08:55:00.000-08:00

I wasn't sure how long I had before Edward made it back to the house, or if, in fact, he was coming back. I couldn't help, though, so I went back inside to wait for the next episode of weirdness to occur.

Janiece and the dope smokers left somewhere around 3am, I guess, and Tiffany and I were finally alone. We talked for a while, me mostly listening (again), and drank a little wine. Somewhere around 5am, things started to get...amorous...

I remember this, and I remember thinking that I could probably "have" this girl if I wanted to. And maybe it was the pot, maybe the events of the evening, but I began to wonder if...if I wanted it.

See kids, while Tiffany told some entertaining stories, she had run through her entire catalog in two and a half nights of what I now recognized as high-speed chatter. I might have been oversensitized by Kim, but I began to doubt whether or not I could actually see Tiffany on a regular basis--and once she started telling me the same tales of Zozobra, I realized I was in for trouble. She was into me, and I was already flinching at the sound of her voice.

Thus, the seed of doubt was planted, or maybe it gestated from a seed of attraction too swollen and hungry to be wholesome. By the time the door burst open, admitting a wild haired and red eyed Edward, I was positively glad for the interruption.

At the time, Edward was doing a lot of "mixed-media" art, and being basically unemployed, found his media wherever he could. This meant that he had a habit of picking up anything shiny that crossed his path, so by the time he'd walked to my house, all of his pockets and both of his hands were completely full of, let's face it, junk. Upon his entry, he sat in the floor and began sorting his plunder.

I decided I'd had enough of just about everything. I informed Edward that I wasn't in any shape to take him home this evening, and since Tiffany was probably going to stay for a while, I'd lend him my blankets so he could sleep on the couch in the living room. I could tell this didn't go over very well, but there was no way in hell I was going to risk a drive to Edmond at that hour, and given all the craziness of the evening, I didn't feel I could ask Tiffany to take him home.

So off he went to the living room, and back she and I went to kissing without taking clothes off. I knew that by sunrise, she would be gone, and I could avoid her calls thereafter. In the meantime, I tried to stay on the right side of the line, sexually.

I think everyone has a few emotional triggers buried in their libidoes. Simply put, you don't do "this" unless you feel "that," and "that" is generally all wound up in what you think your partner (or partners) is feeling. It's a pretty inefficient system, but not an easy one to streamline. My situation was simple: I felt like if all we did was kiss, or at least, if no major sexual activity occurred, I could be OK with never talking to her again.

So I felt like I was finally on top of things, so to speak. Crazy people were either gone or asleep on the couch, warm girl in bed, but not going to stick around. Out of beer and wine, but almost sunrise, and was I ever ready to go to sleep.

Thus, I was pleased when Tiffany noticed the brightening in the windows and headed out to start her car. I was less than pleased when she came back and asked where Edward was. Edward was gone.

Well, shit. I kissed her goodbye, checked all the obvious hiding places in the house and in the back yard, and figured he'd walked down to the payphone and called a ride. Time for a well deserved nap.

Approximately 2 minutes after my head hit the pillow, there was a knock at the door. I ignored it, then remembered I hadn't locked the door, just in case Edward had gone off to sleep in the park or something. I crawled out of bed, grabbed that E&J and, thus fortified, answered the door.

I was greeted with a shirt in the face and the screeching voice of Kim, "THERE'S YOUR SHIRT, YOU SON OF A BITCH!"

Nice.

Her car door slammed by the time I got the shirt untangled from my whiskers and my pint, and squealed out of the driveway, scraping its fiberglass bumper on the slope.

I went back to bed.

What seemed like 15 minutes later, another knock on the door. Awesome. It was Edward, and he was very angry.

Story of Kim 6: Revenge of Kim

2004-11-29T15:15:00.000-08:00

Come to think of it, I don't recall Wayne being around for this event. He's pretty happy about that, most likely.

Anyway, the day of the show came, and people began collecting at my house. Tiffany showed first, and we sat out on the patio talking with my next door neighbor, Janiece, who was beautiful and neurotic in equal measure. Thankfully, her boyfriend Brian was not in evidence, and it looked like I was going to have the company of both of these lovelies for the evening. A few of my other friends began to trickle in, and things were shaping up to be pretty fucking right on. Then Kim showed up.

Now, I don't remember inviting her to this, but that doesn't mean much. I don't remember fucking her, either. But I knew there was going to be trouble, because Edward was on his way as well.

I could have disinvited her, and that would have been the smartest thing to have done. But she looked desperate for company, and I figured, well, it wasn't like we were going to hang around some coffee shop somewhere--there would be a loud ass rock and roll band playing, after all. I did the smart thing and tried to keep Tiffany away from Kim as much as possible, and while I didn't exactly lie to Tiff about my, uh, relationship with Kim, I didn't really go out of my way to talk about it, either. Tiffany seemed to get on well with Janiece, because they were both big potheads, and she remembered Edward from the other night.

Edward was plainly not happy that Kim was there, and Kim did what I HATE: she kept her distance and made with the trembly lip and soulful eyes. Turns out it bugs ol' Edward as well, because I could sense his growing tension, even as he very obviously ignored her, as we waited for the clock to tick over to showtime.

I'll also admit that I was a little hacked off at Edward. It seemed a little ridiculous for him to not even acknowledge her existence--I mean, I was the one who got used as a pawn in some sort of weird sex-power-game, right? And if I could be civil to her, well, shit.

I also confess I had no idea how stubborn Edward could be. This stands him in good stead in a lot of ways, just in case you think I'm hackin' on him, but at this time in our relationship I thought I'd pull a fast one and leave him and Kim alone together. I loaded up the crew, and we all headed out to get some beer.

This was clever of me, because a) I got some beer, b) it forced them to talk to each other, and c) I didn't have to be there when it happened. With any luck, I thought, she'd be gone when I got back.

She wasn't. As I returned from the convenience store, I heard the unmistakable strains of Cevin Cey and the boys melting people's minds with "Harsh Stone White," or maybe "VX Gas Attack." Skinny Puppy, in other words, and Skinny Puppy isn't exactly the type of music they play in marriage counseling sessions. Especially at volumes loud enough to be heard down at the end of the block.

I entered the house, and headed straight for the bedroom, where my little stereo was playing at 11. I found Kim sitting on my bed, almost in tears, looking at the back of Edward's head. For his part, Edward was facing away from Kim, with his nose about six inches from the nearest speaker. With his eyes closed. Dude did NOT want to talk to her. I got his attention, turned down the stereo, and tossed him a beer. It was nearly time to go, and car arrangements had to be made.

During this time I was very concerned about Tiffany's impression of all this--it was unavoidable that she could tell my friends were weird, but I didn't want her to get the impression they were violent and/or neurotic. In fact, I tried to disassociate myself from Kim completely, while carefully steering away from my previous liason with her.

Time to go: Kim rode with me, along with Tiffany, and Edward piled in with Janiece. We weren't even out of the driveway when Kim started whining about Edward. And I do mean whining. The girl had a huge capacity for self pity, and a sort of reedy voice that was always 2 steps away from a whine. I was hatin' life--and decided that enough was enough: "Kim, shut the fuck up about Edward. He's my best fucking friend, and I will not listen to your kvetching about him all the way down to this show. If you want to go to this thing, shut up and deal with him."

(I really should start doing this at the beginning of things, I know, but I'm too nice)

She shut up and dealt with him. Tiffany didn't seem put off by this development at all, so we had a pretty non-awkward trip down to the show. At the show, I planned to avoid Kim, then meet her back at the car afterwards (after all, I couldn't strand the girl, could I?).

Unfortunately, the show was canceled. I saw a dozen people I knew wandering around down there, but nobody seemed to know what the fuck was up, so we all sat around until well after showtime, then headed back to the city in despair. At least I had beer, right?

Back at the house, it was more of the same. Several of us sat around my bedroom and smoked pot, listened to music, and talked. Actually, everyone but Kim sat around in a circle--Kim sat on my bed, outside the circle, and just looked at everyone. Interestingly, nobody seemed in the least inclined to invite her into the circle. I remember thinking, after an hour of this, "how far will ol' girl push this?" Pretty fucking far, apparently, because she actually outwaited everyone at what was now a decent small party, then grabbed Edward and dragged him out into the living room. Tiffany and I were alone together, for the first time all night.

We picked up right where we left off--she seemed to really want this to be normal and pleasant, and I was very, very thankful for that. She turned out to be a Doors fan, and we discussed the John Densmore biography I'd just finished, which she'd picked up and skimmed whenever I was off dealing with someone's party needs.

I had almost forgotten about the storm brewing in the living room, as a matter of fact, which is a testament to Tiffany's personality because there was a lot of breakable stuff in there, and Edward seemed...demonstrative. He's never broken anything of mine, so my fear back then is probably unfounded, but at the time it seemed pretty real.

But eventually we got to a lull. I wasn't sure what time it was, but I was suffering a little from the tunnel vision pot and beer always seems to give me, and I was just beginning to wonder if I look like some kind of stoner jackass (SHUT IT, peanut gallery), when Edward slammed open my bedroom door, and marched inside. He slammed it behind him, as hard as he could, and shouted (as loud as he could) "YOU CAN CRAM THAT FIGURE OF SPEECH RIGHT UP YOUR ASS!" Then he looked over at us, as if seeing us for the first time, and realized the situation I was being put in. To his credit, he apologized and headed back out into the living room.

I knew at this point there was no way I could get out of telling Tiffany the whole sordid story without edging over into dishonesty territory, and I'm just not very good at that. Plus, she'd been nothing but open and accepting of my weird lifestyle, so I owed her the chance to see just how fucking sordid it could get.

She took it very well, I think, but just as I was finishing up we were interrupted by Kim. Kim was crying.

Now, boys and girls, there are two types of women in this world. There are the women that, when they cry, I want to comfort them and, you know, go slay dragons for. I've been fortunate in my life to have run across a good number of these women, because the other type piss me the fuck off.

The other type, of course, are the kind that make me want to smack them and tell them to get over it. I know you can't do that, and I never have, but at times it's scary how...right...that sounds.

You know by now which type Kim was. So when she came to the door, bawling, snot bubbling in her nose and with her eyes red and puffy, the first thing I thought of was how she'd put herself in this predicament. I mean, it was plain to everyone that not only did I not want her around, but Edward was really having a hard time controlling his anger at what he considered a low blow from her. Whether she actually slept with me to get back at him, I have no idea, although the type of woman who'll stand around, meek and passive, hoping for someone to notice her is exactly the type of girl who'd do some passive aggressive bullshit like fuck yer friends to make you jealous. What she hadn't counted on was just how scary Edward can be when he's pissed off.

So she wanted to talk to me, about "us." This is irritating, but since I'd managed to get the story out a few seconds before Tiffany found out on her own, I wasn't that irate. At this point, I was more concerned with finding a useful pretext to kick her the fuck out of my house. Further complicating things was that I had gone to get Edward, so I was going to have to do some pretty fancy footwork to get him home and still have Tiffany around later on.

But back to the wailin' bitch in front of me. She grabbed me by the arm and dragged me out into the dining room. I wasn't in the mood, as you can imagine, but I still felt a little bad because, well, I just do. I suppose I was to blame for a portion of what was going on, right? But after she sniffled out her questions and accusations ("I thought you were my friend," high among them), my mind was momentarily distracted by a very, very angry Edward pacing the living room. This resulted in me picking up the nearest beer, which happened to be hers. We both realized this at the same time, but I needed a drink and was also trying to provoke her into doing something I'd feel good about kicking her out over.

She did. She smacked me full in the face. I'm pretty sure that if I had put down that quart of beer, she would have dumped it on me, but it's pretty hard to get a bottle of beer away from me once I've got hold of it, so I just got a big red handprint and a little bit of overspray from her hissing something melodromatic at me.

I'd been slapped a couple of times before, and it always seemed to me to be just that--a melodramatic act that wasn't terribly effective. I mean, a kick in the nuts is a lot more effective, right? Maybe she couldn't reach that high.

Anyway, that was the excuse I needed. "OK, Kim, you can now get the fuck out of my house. Now." She started bawling again, and I slammed the door on my way back into the bedroom, while winking at Tiffany to show that I wasn't taking any of this too seriously.

Because really, I wasn't. It was an ugly scene, but a scene I knew had been destined to happen at some point, and Tiffany didn't appear bothered by it at all--whenever things got odd, she just picked up her book and ignored us. I like that.

A few minutes after that, Edward came in and made a grand apology. He'd even done me a solid--Kim was going to give him a ride home, and they were going to "talk it out" on the drive back. This was the best news I've heard all night, as you can imagine. They left, and Tiffany and I started making out.

But it was not meant to be (this whole story is the story of me not getting what I want, come to think of it). A couple of my other friends, thinking the show must be over, dropped by with a bunch of pot. Now, Tiffany wasn't one to let pot go unsmoked, so they began to do the social things potheads do, while I nipped outside to grab Janiece.

As I was crossing my yard, I was nearly broadsided by a car pulling up into the grass. It was, of course, Kim, with snot rollin' out of her nose, bright red skin, and absolutely no self control whatsoever. She got out, walked around to the passenger side of her car, and started opening and closing the door.

Now, this is the girl that just finished slapping me inna face, dig? I thought I was pretty cool, but I was in no mood to fuck with her again. "Kim," I said, "you're drunk. Go home."

She came over and gave me one of those hugs (for some reason, touching her always reminded me of touching a toadstool--kind of sickly soft, like rotting things), whimpering about being my friend and being sorry she hit me. I wasn't having any of it, of course, and I had her most of the way back to her car when it struck me: there was no way she had time to drop Edward off and make it back here. That meant, Jesus Christ Almighty, that Edward was wandering around, drunk, pissed off, and rideless. At something approaching 2am, in a city not known for its leniency on drunkards, especially (I realized later) underage drunkards. Hmmm...

I was probably a little rude to her at that point, demanding to know where Edward had got off to. She was not really in the condition to tell me, but between kleenex honkings and snufflings, I gathered that they had actually gone to a Denny's (her favorite hangout) to "talk it out," but they'd started fighting in the car and Edward had bailed out of the car somewhere around 63rd and May. Apparently unhurt, he got away from her, and was now wandering, alone, through the city. Presumably back towards my house.

I was pretty irritated by this. Here he'd been offered a ride home, and he couldn't even keep his act together enough to make it home. In fact, had I felt like I had any chance of finding him, he'd be putting me in danger of a) a DUI, and b) whatever sort of felony you get for providing beer to someone who's not 21. After a long few minutes of thought, I grabbed Janiece and started smoking pot again. The guy has got to learn his lesson, I thought to myself, and I've got a warm girl in my bed.

I Promise I'll Do Better, If You...

2004-11-26T09:20:00.000-08:00

I haven't learned my lesson yet, so I've enrolled in Google Adsense to see if I can't make some money without actually working. Once you start seeing ads that actually try and sell you something, clicking on them will help keep me from starving to death once I get out of here. Until then, clicking on it helps keep me from drinking Kentucky Deluxe, and makes sure I've got enough condoms to keep everybody happy.

So really, it's a public service. Win win. All that.

And I promise, I'll write another installment this weekend. Maybe even finish this thing up. THEN what?

Story of Kim 5: Substory Tiffany 2

2004-11-19T09:03:00.000-08:00

The following weekend, Edward showed up at my place with a few beers, and we sat out on the porch to discuss the "Kim Situation." He wasn't angry with me at all, he said, but was pretty pissed off at her. I feel like Edward would also like me to point out the reason he wasn't mad at me was because he expected me to do stuff like this, which I suppose I won't argue about. But I try, yo. I try real hard.

No, the reason he was angry with her was that she had apparently tried to do the same thing with his brother a few days before. This had all the hallmarks of a raging passive aggressive obsessive nutcase, I thought, and I was slightly relieved that she wasn't quite as focused on me as she might have been.

Edward was mad, though, and once we finished the beer, he suggested we drop in on a party his brother was having, in Edmond.

Now, Edmond is kind of a weird place. Everyone under 30 years old calls it a college town, and everyone over 30 calls it a bedroom community--a suburb of OKC. Both are, in fact, true, but the important thing to remember about this is that Edmond is about 20 miles away from the house I was living in. Edmond is also where Edward was living, which probably explains why he was so prone to sleeping in my tub instead of driving home.

His brother, who we'll call "Don," lived with a lovely young woman named Brooke in some apartments fairly close to the college. I was a little nervous about attending this party, because a) I hadn't been invited, b) didn't know and had never met Don, and c) Edward seemed to get more and more pissed the more beer we drank. But my strategy has always been "devil take the hindmost," and Edward was driving, so off we went.

The party was a bunch of people smoking dope and listening to Tool while doing shots and keg stands. In short, my kind of people. Edward introduced me to a couple of cool guys, then grabbed Don and dragged him off to a corner, where he began talking intently in low tones and making some rather worrisome gestures with his hands. I wandered off to find a beer, and soon found myself smoked out around the kitchen table with Brooke and a couple of her friends, most notably a girl named Tiffany.

I didn't know this Tiffany, and since the other Tiffany doesn't make another appearance in this story, you shouldn't be confused. A storyteller less intent on verisimilitude would have changed the name, but hey, I have faith in you guys.

So Tiffany was very cute, and very much a party girl, and she seemed pleased to make my acquaintance. She was actually in town for the holidays as well, from an art school in...Santa Fe, I think. We hit it off really well, and when Edward came around to check on me, there was no trace of my former nervousness to be found. Must have been the weed, man.

The party lasted til 3 or 4 in the morning, and at the end Tiffany suggested that Edward and I go with her to Denny's, or whatever all night greasepit we went to back in those days. I was happy to oblige, and made it clear on the way over there that I was in fact very interested in Tiffany, and there wouldn't be any of this friendly competition like there had been with Kim a few months ago. Maybe he knew something I didn't, or maybe he was drunk, but after an hour or so in that restaurant, he asked if she could take me home (which was 20 miles in the wrong direction, a sure litmus test of her feelings for me, especially at 5am), and when she assented, made a graceful exit.

Now, I know you guys are going to find this hard to believe, but I'm actually a pretty shy individual. While I've certainly had a few one night stands in my time, in general I'm not the type of guy to just lay one on ya the first time we meet. So Tiffany and I sat around on my bedroom floor, listened to records, and talked until well after sunrise, at which point she left and I fell asleep on the floor (in that order). She was staying with her parents, and I didn't have a phone, so we agreed to meet a couple of nights later for a few glasses of wine and some more conversation.

[The Cliff's Notes version of the above paragraph would read: "I liked her a lot, and I didn't want to do anything that would make her not like me, so I kept my hands to myself."]

On the night I was to meet her, I stopped at the liquor store and was immediately confronted with the fact that I didn't know a damn thing about wine. I'd never purchased wine for a first date, at any rate, and so I did what a lot of people do (at least, I hope they do): Bought the one with the wicker basket attached. What the hell, I thought, I need another candleholder anyway.

The evening was a success--we talked until late, again, and it turned out she'd taken almost as much acid as I had. She had lived a pretty crazy life out west, it appeared, and that was the type of girl I was looking for. I couldn't tell if she was impressed by the basket thingy, but at the end of the evening I stole a kiss goodnight. It was a very passionate kiss, and it was accompanied by an embrace that didn't linger for nearly long enough. Once she was safely out the door and pointed towards home, I probably did a little jig in the living room, but I can't say for sure.

We met again that weekend, and stayed up all night drinking more wine from baskets and talking (or rather, I listened to her talk--she seemed to have a lot of stories about Santa Fe), and when the sun came up I ventured another kiss. It occurred to me then that we'd done nothing but hang around my gnarly old house, and that girls liked to be taken out in public occasionally. It also occurred to me that one of my favorite bands was playing in Norman (boo!) the following weekend. Eventually I asked her to accompany me and a group of my friends, and she agreed. A DATE!

I spent the intervening week coordinating with friends, including Edward and, if I'm not mistaken, the lovely and talented Wayne, of Big Cliche fame. I also spent a lot of time parked at a payphone, talking to Tiffany. The weekend couldn't come fast enough.

Story of Kim 4: Edward Sings the Drunk Song

2004-11-15T13:14:00.000-08:00

He didn't show up at all that weekend, but as you can imagine I wasn't exactly upset by this; I wanted to do some hard thinking about a) whether I should feel bad about what I'd done, and b) whether I should tell Edward about the encounter in the first place.

During the course of the week, which was thankfully Kim free, I concluded that I didn't feel bad, except inasmuch as I felt like I'd betrayed myself. I also concluded that it really wasn't any of Edward's business who I was sleeping with, so I didn't feel obligated to go out of my way to tell him. This is, come to think of it, just the sort of construct I build to avoid thinking I'm a liar, but I think I can be forgiven for just wanting to forget the whole sorry incident. Kim, however, had other plans.

It was on a Thursday night, I think, when Edward finally showed up. I still had some cash left, so we went out and grabbed a case of beer, then sat around and regaled a couple of his out-of-town friends with tales of excess and depravity. This culminated in a midnight walk across the street to the park, where he and I scaled the (now dry) fountain and sang a rousing chorus of "She Caught the Katy," probably most familiar to you as the opening song in the movie "The Blues Brothers." It's what we do when we're drunk and happy--that and wrestle, and it was too cold for wrestling.

All in all, it was a good Thursday night, and it was winding down just as I had hoped, that is, before midnight and with me NOT broke or shitfaced. However, upon turning the corner to go back to the house, I saw what was probably the last car I wanted to see right then: Kim's. Worse, it was parked behind Edward's truck, that is, in my driveway. Not good.

I had a few seconds to think about what to do, and I chose what I'd like to think was the honorable way out. I stopped in the field across from my house, said "Edward, I need to tell you something. I apparently had sex with Kim last weekend."

I must say, he handled it pretty well. As I've mentioned previously, he really didn't have that much room to be angry, but logic wasn't one of his strong points when it came to sex--which is no great failing, I think, or at least not a rare one. Anyway, he kind of stopped in the middle of the vacant lot, stroked his chin for a sec, and said "huh. OK." Then turned and walked to the house. I followed, and as the crew assembled in the cold, cold living room, I searched the house for any sign of Kim. It wasn't that large of a house, actually, and parts of it were even blocked off, so it didn't take long to find her (although the time seemed to pass slowly as I envisioned her curled up naked in my bed, with Edward close behind me--basically blowing my "drunken mistake" argument out of the water). She was in the bathroom, and she was shitfaced.

She basically fell into my arms, slurring about how much she liked me and how drunk she was and how I was really the best she'd ever been with, and how she was too drunk to drive home and needed to stay somewhere and I was close. Which, given the bar she claimed to have been in, was a flat out lie. This annoyed me, so I took a little guilty pleasure in the look on her face when I told her that "Edward" was in the next room.

"Oh my gosh," she muttered, a horrified look in her suddenly focused eyes. "You're not going to tell him...about us, are you?"

Jesus Christ, I thought, what's it take to get through these girls' heads? "THERE IS no 'us,' Kim!" She put a hand on the wall and sort of stumbled out, without acknowledging what I'd said. And it never occurred to me that I hadn't said "yes, I've already told him we slept together." Which might (or might not) have saved me some trouble later on.

I was pretty embarrassed by the whole situation, and it's human nature (I think) to get a little hacked off at the thing that humiliates you. In this case, I stayed back in the back for a bit, taking off my boots and picking up beer cans, trying to get calm so I wouldn't be rude to Kim when I had to see her again.

Soon enough, everyone left but Kim, who still claimed to be too drunk to drive.

As an aside, that's one of the few things I won't think twice about. You could be Josef Stain, and I'd still not begrudge you a few hours on my couch if you pleaded drunk. Sending someone out in the cold, to attempt a drive home when they already KNOW they shouldn't be driving, is not only unsafe, it's bad karma. So as much as I felt like she was probably faking it, I let it go.

Unfortunately, I'd been drinking too, so I didn't think about the heating situation.

See, back when I'd first moved into the place, I'd had to live in the front room, partly because it was conveniently heated, and partly because the bedroom was Where The Ex Used To Sleep. After a winter of $300 heating bills, and a new bed, I felt it would behoove me to sleep in the bedroom again, so I moved back there. I still wasn't making shit for money, though, so I still only heated one room--the back one.

The upshot of all this is that I couldn't bring myself to make Kim sleep out in the cold. She's a girl, and delicate. But I was still mad at her, and not about to change that, so I said "yes, you can sleep in here, but don't even THINK about touching me." Which got me a hurt look and a trembly lip, but no argument.

Just to make sure, I went to bed dressed for work the next morning, down to the workboots. She made one attempt, was rebuffed, got up and left. Guess she wasn't that drunk after all.

Now, this could very well be the end of this story, if there wasn't some weird shit going around that I didn't know about at this point. But there is, so you have at least two and probably three more installments of this to go. Hopefully I'll have time tomorrow to get it out. Definitely before the weekend.

Story of Kim 3: "You Fucked the Autopilot."

2004-11-12T08:52:00.000-08:00

So it was that one day in early November I was playing hooky from work, lonely and bored. I hadn't seen much in the way of my friends since the end of the summer, due to a couple of them dicking me over, school, and the cold weather-related reduction in available roof/wine drinking time. The New Orleans had either shut down, or I was mad enough at the owner that I wasn't spending any money there. Either was likely.

As I laid in bed, reading, and being bored, my thoughts wandered to a certain sweet young girl I hadn't seen since that summer. Her name was Tiffany, and she was literally sweet and young. I don't think I've ever met a kinder, gentler person than Tiffany, and she was only 17 when I met her. She was the type of girl that made me feel like a coarse, dirty thug, but that she loved me anyway. In other words, I felt like she was unreachable--too pretty, too perfect, and too nice.

I had recently heard she was single, and I also heard that she was working at a comic book store close by my house.

So I figured what the hell. No harm in visiting an old friend, hey? We were friends, mind you, even though I had ulterior motives. Off I went to the comic shoppe.

No Tiffany. But oddly enough, there was a Kim. She seemed entirely too glad to see me, and sort of bullied me into agreeing to get coffee with her later on that day, once she got off work.

And yeah, I have to be honest, I didn't mind the company too much. I was lonely, and she wasn't hard to look at, and we had Edward to talk about. Additionally, it was time to start Christmas shopping, and I HATE shopping by myself, so we drank coffee, cruised the mall, and split, after exchanging phone numbers. By the time it was all over, I'd spent most of the day with her, and was ready to be alone again.

She talked about Edward a lot, and apparently had been speaking with him on the phone some, which I thought was kind of weird given that he'd barely escaped her clutches when here in the city. But shit, I thought, I'm sure he's lonely as all get out up there, so I can't blame him too much. I was also kind of relieved that she didn't appear to be latching on to me, because she definitely seemed to be the clutchy type.

A couple of days after that, she showed up on my doorstep with a handful of comic books. I was rather nonplussed that she came over without warning, but not wanting to be rude, I invited her in. She gifted me with the comic books, despite the fact that we had never discussed them, and in fact I'm not much of a fan [as a side note, that is changing now]...so there were a few moments of awkwardness when she realized she'd just given me a gift she'd meant to give to someone else (I gave them back to her a few days later). She didn't appear to have much reason to come by, exactly, and as some of my former roommates can attest, I'm not much of a talker or socializer during the work week. After a couple of (interminable) hours, she apparently got the vibe I was sending out, and left. But first, she gave me a big hug.

I wasn't paying attention to any of this. She verged on annoying, and I thought she was still carrying a torch for ol' Edward, so I didn't think much farther than "getoutgetoutgetout."

The next night, she came over again. And the following night. The night after THAT (yes, the fourth night after the comic book thing), I did the honest and forthright thing and shut off all my lights and locked the door. I was going to bed early in those days anyway, so it was no big deal.

It seemed that did the trick--I didn't hear from her at all over the weekend and during the week. I did, however, hear from Edward. He was going to be visiting the city over Thanksgiving, and wanted to make sure I had the fridge stocked with whatever cheap ass beer I could afford.

So the weekend finally arrived, and I made a special trip to the liquor store for supplies. I was very, very pleased to be seeing Edward again, partly because my life at that time was pretty well devoid of both intelligent conversation and human interaction in general. That, and I wanted some good alcohol for once.

I'd been reading the autobiography of John Densmore, drummer for The Doors, because I've always been a fan of Crazy Jim Morrison, and one specific paragraph had been sticking with me lately--it talked about an incident where Jim had slipped away and purchased a bottle of Jack Daniels right before a show, and gotten too drunk to play.

So, my shopping list was short: a case of beer, a fifth of Jack, and a 2 1/2 gal jug of bad German white wine. And a bottle of Boone's Farm, for the Land Speed Record which is another story.

Saturday night, a couple of my friends showed up to wait for Edward and his people to arrive. We sat in my bedroom, because that was the only room that was heated, and talked back and forth. They were drinking beer, I was taking hits off of the whiskey and chasing it with beer. Pretty soon, we were drunk, and Edward wasn't around.

I remember finishing the beer, and I remember the empty whiskey bottle. There's a brief flash that I can recall, later, of me opening the screw top on the big bottle of wine. An even dimmer flash of the 2 1/2 gallon wine jug, nearly empty.

And then, nothing.

I woke up in the morning, with a head (predictably) the size of a basketball. Something wasn't right--I wasn't...alone.

It was Kim. She was naked, and I was naked, and we were in bed together, and I couldn't for the life of me remember how it happened. I mean, I had a pretty good idea, but there's nothing in my mind (to this day) that could serve as a supporting fact to my hypothesis.

Edward, I knew, was going to be fucking pissed. Not that he'd have a lot of valid reasons to be pissed--after all, he'd dumped her and moved away, and in fact had to do some pretty fast talking to keep her from moving with him, which is as good a reason as any to think that ol' boy was "finished" with her. But I knew, deep down, that Edward wasn't rational about some things, and one of those things was (at that time) women.

Worse, she had that look in her eye. That one look, you know, that reminds me of puppies and baby deer and soft, helpless, innocent things that should be cross stitched onto a goddamn pillow somewhere. The look that all but screamed "I LOVE YOU!" The look, ladies and gentlemen, that you don't want to see on someone's face the morning after a bender. It was a look that told me Edward might not be the biggest of my problems.

When she caught my eye, she got all modest and began saying things that ultimately would have led up to something I definitely didn't want to hear. She stammered something along the lines of "I don't normally do one night stands," and then something about how wonderful I'd been, and how she'd always liked me, etc. This was hurting my head, and I realized I was going to have to be direct and kind of mean to keep this from getting out of hand (or more than it already was).

So I kicked my feet over the side of the mattress, knocking over the empty whiskey bottle on the floor, and found a pint of E&J brandy I'd bought, then realized I didn't like. Anything was better than listening to her drivel when I was sober, I thought, so I took a couple of big mouthfuls and listened to her while it warmed my belly. Finally, I turned to her, looked her in the eye, and said "look, I don't want to give you any false impressions. I don't remember sleeping with you. I don't remember when you got here, or how we wound up in bed together. Plainly we had sex, but I don't remember it. In fact, Kim, I think it would be safe to say you fucked the autopilot. And that's not going to happen again."

She took it better than I thought she would, but didn't seem to show much inclination to get dressed and leave. Thus would begin the awkward part of the morning after--giving someone the hint.

Thankfully, my pager went off, and I was quick enough on the uptake to tell her it was my boss, and I was going to have to go to work. It wasn't my boss, of course, but rather my actual date for the evening, but the little white lie hurt no one. Kim got dressed, reluctantly, and left. After another hug that lingered way too long.

Story of Kim 2: Jefe Loses Out

2004-11-09T09:14:00.001-08:00

The redhead's name was Kim, and she was a nice calm young woman, a year or so older than me. Edward and I took her out to various places, most of which I can't recall, but I remember we were downtown (clearly violating Kerr Park curfew, for those of you who spent your angry youth downtown skateboarding or taking acid) when I realized he and I had been competing for this girl's affections all day. This was my problem for a long period of time--taking things at face value, and/or missing subtexts and/or obvious body language. What can I say? I'm an idiot--I'm better about it now, but back then I still thought people not only said what they meant, they said everything they meant.

But once I realized what was going on, I did some quick mental arithmetic and decided a number of things:

1) Edward clearly wanted this girl, for one of two reasons

a) he was very attracted to her
or
b) his competitive nature had been aroused, and he just wanted to "beat" me.

and

2) I really wasn't that interested in Kim.

So I backed off, and if I remember right, even began upselling Edward a bit--but I did make excuses and leave them with plenty of the night remaining.

Turns out that's all that they needed. The next time I saw him, they were seeing each other, and both seemed quite happy. Edward was pleased to have someone that was (to all outward appearances) stable and calm, and Kim made no secret of how much she enjoyed Edward's, uh, dynamic energy.

So the summer progressed, and the coffee flowed, and I got a number of roommates in what was formerly a very lonely house. We were all busy, in short, and I think Edward and I may have drifted apart a bit, because he was working while I was free, and vice-versa. It was sweet to see Edward bustling about shouting and pouring coffee, while his little redhead sat at a small table in the corner doing a crossword puzzle, occasionally looking up to moon over her boy.

After a few weeks of this, Edward and I found ourselves alone on my porch together, with some sort of beer in a can, and thoughts turned to Kim. Being a neurotic, trouble borrowing motherfucker, even back then, I was beginning to wonder just how Edward had managed to wrangle such a cute, mild tempered woman into dating him until he moved away to school, in a couple of months.

In this first conversation, his reply to my query was "well, I just told her, 'look, I don't want a long distance thing, we have this time together,' you know, just laid it out, and she's OK with it." And this seemed as it should be--you have rules, and one of the rules is that if you're capable of talking about the difficult stuff involved in a relationship, you're capable of being honest with one another about the relationship, and by dint of being rational, adult human beings, content with the way it's going to progress and/or end up. Shit, this is how -I- deal with things, right?

But by the middle of July, I could tell something was wrong. Edward was...not quite dodging Kim, but spending more time at my place than he had during most of the summer. Kim's doting looks were tinged with need and maybe a hint of desperation, and her omnipresence in the cafe became obsessive.

At the beginning of August, I asked him again about "how things were going." He said basically the same thing as the first time, except slightly more specific. As a bit of a forensic conversationalist, what I gathered from our second discussion was mainly that they had already had multiple conversations about what I'm sure she termed as "their future," despite earlier agreements that there was no future. If you make it clear at the outset that you don't want the relationship to extend past a certain date, for instance, there's no reason to bring up the fact that it wouldn't be cool for the other person to move to whatever city you're moving to. In short, things were getting out of hand for ol' Edward.

Now, back at the beginning of the summer, I thought she was attractive and fun. After a month or so of watching her watch him work the cafe, I not only wasn't attracted to her, it would be fair to say I didn't even like her.

[I've given some thought recently to criticism that I don't like anyone's boy/girlfriend, and I think I can completely avoid meeting this criticism by pointing out that this girl was really and truly a freak. So there.]

And so, the end of the summer came, and since I don't remember Edward's going away party it must have been a hell of a good one. I was in the middle of some serious shit in my own life at the time, having lost all three roommates to ridiculous circumstances. I found myself not only roommateless, but also owing back rent to the tune of nearly $1000, and no visible means of income (my LSD connection had been thrown into disarray because someone in the group was a narc, and I wasn't making that much money anyway). In short, we kind of lost track of one another. In late September, I got my old job back, which helped the money situation for a bit, but then winter and short days crept in, and I found myself sick, cold, and lonely one afternoon in early November.

Story of Kim 1: Summer of 93

2004-11-06T06:53:00.000-08:00

While we're on the subject of girls I should have stayed the hell away from, I figured I might as well dig another one out of the more distant past. It's a torrid tale of whiskey and loneliness and a small bottle of E&J I kept by my bed for no good reason at all.

It's also a tale involving someone who reads this blog at least semi-regularly, so I will change that person's name, and he'd better have enough sense to keep his trap shut. Ready? OK then.

Back in the summer of 93 I had a pretty solid crew of friends that actually LIVED IN THE SAME CITY as me, in some cases as close as next door. We did a lot of crazy things, of course, because a) none of us really had jobs and b) I had access to a lot of really, really good LSD. I'm trying to work those things into a coherent tale, but for now you'll have to be content with the Story of Kim.

I had a friend named Edward, who I'd met while I was in school at UCO, but who was planning to transfer to another school that fall, out of state, but close by.

On a weekend in late...May, I think it was, Edward and I had spent the night drinking whiskey and arguing about the definition of art (I'm not kidding--these were the days) out on the front porch, with the ultimate result of Edward falling asleep in my bathtub. [Let's face it, the man couldn't drink brown liquor, and we both knew it, but he was always game for trying and by the time he'd start running his bath I was too drunk to care anyway.]

Sunday morning I staggered out of bed after being awakened by the grumbling and muttering of a wet, half naked Edward, surveyed the wreckage of my refrigerator, and proposed that we visit New Orleans Cafe for breakfast.

As I've mentioned in the Meghan story, New Orleans Cafe was the locus of nearly all hipster activity at the time, because it had the two things young hipsters require: cheap coffee and bad art. Well, maybe the art wasn't ALL bad, but it was mostly artists who didn't mind letting their paintings get covered in grease and soot from the kitchen, which meant a lot of dilettante hippy friends of the owner, who's a whole fucking story by himself.

Upon arriving at the place, I was comforted to see the large round table by the door was nearly full of good people, almost all of whom I knew.

[as an aside, that table held about fifteen people, if you sqeezed them in, and most days and nights you could always find someone you knew sitting at it--it was a sort of proto-friendster, facilitating introductions and contributing to (dare I say it?) a sense of community in a city that doesn't otherwise have a lot to offer for people like me. I loved that table, as greasy and fucked up as it was.]

So, we took the remaining two seats at the table, ordered breakfast, and settled in to talk. The people, as I said, were cool, and some of them close friends, but Edward and I both noticed a girl I hadn't seen before. She was attractive, with reddish hair and green eyes, and before long I was wondering how I'd managed to miss meeting her during all my other visits. She knew all the people at the table, it seemed like, and I knew everyone at the table...and she was apparently single. Hmmm...

I looked at Edward, and I could see in his beady little eyes that he was thinking the same thing.

Shampoo 5: Depths of Depravity

2004-10-28T08:26:00.000-07:00

I've put off writing this because I haven't been sure how to write the things I need to get across without sounding like I'm bragging. Which I'm definitely NOT doing.

So, like all of my story endings, I'm just going to do it and get it over with. Probably one more post after this one, incidentally.

Her house was a small brick home somewhere in Norman. It was tidy, and filled with the sort of things you could imagine a single professional mom in Oklahoma filling her house with--and none of the sort of stuff you find in my house. There were pictures of children on the walls, instead of framed Skinny Puppy posters, and all the CD's were neatly stored in things that looked like they were made for storing CD's. Anathema. I was beginning to see what she liked about me...

But I didn't get much chance to absorb all this before she was pouring me shitty German wine and showing me the "erotica" she wrote. I managed to avoid reading it at all, somehow, because if there's one thing I can't stand it's bad writing, and I had the feeling that she wasn't much of a writer. Which was OK, she wasn't wanting me to critique it anyway.

The bedroom was pretty much what I expected--lots of pillows and lace and Ann Rice books, and a big ol' locked wooden box of mama's "toys." I won't go into what was in that box, much less what came OUT of it...in fact, I've blotted a lot of that night out completely. That night's not important, except that I had the ominous feeling I was fulfilling some final part of a horrible prophecy that only she knew.

The next morning I awoke and immediately reached for the half full beer on her bedside table. I hadn't seen this woman in the mornings yet, but I knew I didn't want to see it on an empty stomach.

Gail, for her part, was chirpy and contented, bustling around the house and singing to herself, picking up bottlecaps and in general making the place look like it did before I got there. I put my pants on and laid back down with _Queen of the Damned_ to keep my head from splitting in two. After an hour or so, she came back in and slid into bed beside me (urk!).

"What's your fantasy," she murmured?

Now, there MAY be one or two readers out there who know just how bland and uninteresting my fantasies are, but I doubt it. The reason for that is I keep my trap shut about my fantasies until I'm relatively certain this person isn't going to be some sort of freak, which is exactly what Gail was turning out to be...

So she decided to tell me about HER favorite thing. She whispered in my cringing ear, and it wasn't that weird, so I acquiesced.

Shower sex, in and of itself, isn't that odd. I confess I like wet naked (cute) girls in my shower. I do. Wet naked Gail, however, put me off my feed for quite some time...

See, she didn't want me to actually fuck her in the shower. What she wanted...well, it's hard for me to say, but I will: she wanted to soap up my cock and have me rub it between her legs from behind.

There. I said it. Give me a sec to catch my breath. Jesus. I can see it in my mind's eye to this day: the greenish bathroom tile, the frosted shower door, the pink loofa...the bath oils and fifteen shampoos, the bottle of Bass Ale I'd insisted on bringing into the shower stall, like a security blanket...

And then it was over. I found my happy place, I guess, away from her grindings and gobbling noises and wet creases and the feeling of being trapped and WAY too sober for this to be fun...but the next thing I know, I'm cracking another bottle of Bass and trying to locate my clothes again. It was Sunday, and her kids would be back in a few hours, so she drove me up to the city. I was ready to go in and take ANOTHER shower, but she came inside with me. She'd been kind of quiet on the way home, which gave me some time to nurse a hangover and wounded psyche, but she followed me into my bedroom, sat down on the bed, and said the words you just plain don't want to hear: "Jeff, I think I've fallen in love with you."

This was, on its face, such a ridiculous statement that I got a little ticked off. We've gone into my feelings on this sort of treachery over on Seeing in the Dark, so I won't repeat it here (plus, it's getting late and I'm tired). Suffice to say that she and I more or less mutually agreed that this was a violation of the "just sex" covenant, and that at the very least we would never sleep together again. She left, verging on tears, and I cracked another beer and sat on the back stoop til it got dark.

Midmorning on Monday, she called me at work. In a cold, professional voice, she began to berate me for not having her landscape work done. We argued. She threatened to cancel the job. I told her bluffing is one thing that doesn't work with me. She hung up. Called back an hour later, with the same spiel. Spin. Repeat. Life was hell. I got home that night, sat on the back porch, and drank 3 or 4 quarts of beer, then fell asleep with my shoes and pants on.

Tuesday, she made it til nearly noon before calling me. Since I was alone this time, I was able to ask her what I'd been thinking, which I'd be curious to see if you guys think it was appropriate or not: I asked her if she was being a bitch to me because she truly felt the job was behind schedule, or because I had dumped her (even though, again, she had said at the time she knew it wasn 't going to "work out between us"). This provoked an even colder, hissing rage that made me glad I wasn't her exhusband.

Tuesday afternoon, I noticed I was...adjusting my package...more often than usual. By Tuesday evening, I realized I had a full on rash down there. And by the time I hit the shower, Big Wally was very obviously in bad shape.

I'd never seen anything like it, especially not with MY penis: the ol' boy was red and irritated, and most importantly, seemed to be developing some cracks and some serious eczema.

"Holy shit," I thought, "the bitch had VD!" I began to think of what I knew about venereal diseases in general, and realized that I was definitely not an expert in that area. I briefly considered calling Wayne and/or Keith, since they were in the Navy and had seen films on this sort of thing, but ultimately did what I always do when part of my body starts acting up: ignore it, and hope it goes away. There's no way in HELL I would have lived long enough to quit hearing about this whole thing, so I daubed some sort of hand lotion or antibiotic cream on my johnson and slept on my back. Sort of slept, I mean. I spent most of the night thinking about whether or not I should call her, be vindictive, take the high road, or what...

Thankfully, she didn't call the next day. I guess she was embarrassed about the fit she threw the day before, or maybe she was down at the clinic, but I didn't have to deal with her. Which was good-I had my hands full (so to speak) with a dick that looked like it belonged on a leper.

That night, as I was daubing it with Eucerin or whatever, I began to think back on exactly when I could have gotten this. I'm pretty anal retentive about condom use, especially in situations like that, so it was pretty easy to narrow things down.

It had to have been that time in the shower.

But I hadn't actually had SEX with her...and while it's concievable that some sort of critter had slid out of there and hitched a ride on the johnson, it didn't seem right that it could affect my penis so quickly...plus, there had been all that....

Shampoo.

Shampoo that I probably didn't wash off very well, since I was in such a hurry to get out of that stall with my warm, half-watered down Bass and the shreds of my self-respect (and the basis of this story). Shampoo that I'd been distracted from washing off later by her ill starred confession of love, and my subsequent retreat into brown bottle therapy.

Yep, folks, it wasn't VD. It was Prell.