365 Fucked Up Stories

PoppaLarge posted this on Mar 12th, 2008 at 11:26:09 pm
A bold experiment. Self-explanatory. I’m in need of a challenge. Big ups to Justn for inspiring this.

Of course this story had to be the 365th.

Given that when I was 18 years old I had not exactly had a gaggle of people who had taken a good look at my nutsack, I think it was my first college girlfriend Jenni who pointed out that the big yellowish zit looking thing on my balls was sort of weird and fucked up.

Look, dudes get zits on their junk. Tiny little ones. It’s a fact of life. But this one was not small. It was big and sort of swollen out of my sack, like half a dime around or more. I’d noticed it before and chosen to ignore it. Ok, that’s not true. I’d actually tried to pop it which make me sort of dizzy and unhappy, so then I’d tried to ignore it. But having someone else see it, especially someone that I was, you know, getting it on with, made it impossible to ignore, and with it, a certainly underlying paranoia about sex I’d done a lot to repress.

So I started thinking about when this thing appeared and what exactly it could be and I thought about having sex with Vicious in her filthy van and the exactly eight seconds I had unprotected sex with Andiee and the other fooling around I’d done and more or less rode that train to “I have some sort of horrible STD”-ville, a place that in my late teens and 20’s I revisited frequently any time I had sex with someone creepy or couldn’t stop being sick for weeks at a time.

Still, I refused to schedule an appointment about my balls, but since I had an ingrown toenail that needed to be removed anyway, I decided to ask the doctor about it.

“Um, I have…” I tried to think of a good way to say it. “…a thing, on my stuff.”

“Well, let’s take a look,” the doctor said, and slapped on the gloves. I had never seen this guy before and haven’t since. “Why don’t you show me?”

I am always convinced that the sheer awkwardness of such situations, the same awkwardness that leads me to laugh during really melodramatic indie films about horrible middle-class white families whose dysfunction makes everyone sad and drug addled and/or gay, would cause me to get hard when someone of either gender touches my dick, sort of like a gag reflex or something. But I took a deep breath and put my balls into his hands.

After considering it for a moment, the doctor let go and said, “it’s a blocked pore, like a big zit, not a big deal. I can lance it if you want but I’m guessing you don’t want me to.”

Big sigh of relief.

So I had this thing. It was there with Jenni, and with Jess; it hung out sophomore year and junior year and long into my relationship with Aly and the forced execution of any shame I had that made me feel ok about playing rock shows naked in front of people and whipping my nuts out as party tricks. It would get bigger and smaller and I don’t remember if it ever really went away for a while because I just got so used to it. I mean, it first came a calling in 1993 or 94. It was just a thing, and who gives a thing about a thing?

Then one day, it disappeared. Well, not entirely–everything inside it had gone, leaving this little pink, shriveled flap of skin like a deflated balloon. I asked my current Doc, he of the ejackeration into a cup, what could be done and he mentioned cutting it off. This scared the living shit out of me, so instead I got used to the flap too.

Kira was born in later 2007 and I spent the first couple months of her life freaking out that I wasn’t doing anything with myself and that years of playing it safe had now backed me into a corner where I was unhappy, had made nothing of myself, and was responsible for not screwing up this amazing little innocent person who kept me up all night. So I started searching for something more, and one day, in a particularily bad mood, I went to the gym for the first time in months and did some crazy dead sprint on the elliptical until I thought I was going to almost puke. When I got home, I had this chafing pain downtown and checked–a loose string from my workout shorts had wrapped around the flap of skin and irritated the hell out of it and in addition to hurting like a bastard, it was now swelling to the size of a marble. A really painful marble that stuck to my leg.

This was the last straw. It had been a decade and a half–it was time to say goodbye to my little friend.

So I went to the doctor with this and a bunch of other stuff I’d been putting off. “Hey Big Guy, how are you?”

“Good, Doc, good,” I said.

“So you have problem with something on your testicles?”

AAARRGGGH.

So I showed him the new swollen marble and he said, “I’ll just trim that off.” I got on the table, pulled my pants to my knees, and then laid back holding my dick while he numbed my nuts. Numbnuts, ha-ha.

Me, uncomfortable, giggling. Doc looked at me. “You know I laugh when I get nervous.” “Hold still, Big Guy.” And then, with a scalpel, so fast I didn’t feel a think–the numb nuts helped–he sliced the thing right off. He showed it to me in a little jar. Removed from me it looked shriveled and grey, more the size of a pea than the marble size it had hit a few days before.

“Ok, big guy, it’s done. Now I will use silver nitrate to stop the bleeding and seal the wound.” He started painting this stuff on, me wishing there was a mirror on the ceiling so I could see what the fuck he was doing. Then: “Huh.”

“Huh what?” I asked.

“Well, you are bleeding a lot.”

I thought about getting my tongue pierced in 1994 and every scrape before and after. “I’m kind of a bleeder.”

“Is it a problem, like a condition?” He sounded concerned.

Me, flat on my back, still holding my dick: “No, no, I just bleed.”

“Well, the silver nitrate, it should stop the bleeding, but it’s not, so I will try some more.”

Now, I’ll leave it up to you to look silver nitrate up on the old intraweb, but it stops bleeding by chemically burning the flesh it touches. “It’s still not working, so please hold here…” and Doc put my hand on my balls, “…I’ll be right back, I’m going to use a special tool we have here to cauterize the wound.” The wound, of course, on my nuts.

He left me flat on my back with both hands on my junk. It was about this point that I decided to sit up and figure out what was going on, to find that he hadn’t shut the door completely. I did this just in time to catch someone in the hallway getting a big old eyeful of me in all my bleeding genital glory. I thought of the first time I had sex in a bed in a crappy hotel that got torn down a few years ago and the door that didn’t shut all the way. Then I just laid back down, only to hear: “Does anyone know where the cauterizing gun went?”

“Um, I think it’s broken,” said a woman’s voice, the same woman, I imagined, who hadn’t expected to see my full frontal when she woke up that morning. “We have the hand held, though, do you know how to use it?”

Now, that is usually a yes or no question, but Doc replied, “It will be OK.”

My balls were still numb, and at this point nervous giggling was the order of the day, so when Doc returned with the cauterizing gun I just said, “It can’t get much worse, right?” with a big smile on my face.

He got to work. The gun made a quiet mid-frequency humming and not the welding torch-like sound I had imagined. I still didn’t feel a thing. Everything seemed to be going well. Until the smell hit.

The smell of burning public hair.

At this I gave up any sense of decorum and just started laughing, tears in my eyes, as he patted my junk with gauze making sure my pubes didn’t burn to the root, a little bit of smoke rising and that acrid smell that somehow reminded me of the incense we used as an altar boy at church when I was a kid.

And then: “OK, big guy, we’re all done.”

I sat up. “So it’s ok?” I looked down. An entire section of my scrotum was cleared of pubic hair, black from the silver nitrate with a dark brown spot in the middle from the cauterizing gun. “Uh, it is supposed to look like that? Do I need to do anything to care for it?”

“Yes, no problem, it’s fine. Don’t do a thing. You can do whatever, go to the gym.” He didn’t mention the fact that, in the night, my nuts would rest on my leg, the still-caustic silver nitrate burning a huge raw spot in my inner thigh.

I was unsure. It was weird to think that something I had been carrying since I was a kid, something I’d forgotten about and noticed more times than I could count, was gone in just a few minutes, replaced by flesh that looked like scorched earth, a burnt feeling that only time would heal. “So we’re good, then?” I asked.

“All done,” he said.

I am fighting every effort not to try and do some dramatic examination on the “meaning” of this project, because I know I wouldn’t be able to put exactly what I’m saying into words, but I’d like to make a couple points. Saying something got a life of its own is cliche as shit but it’s unavoidable in this case, because as I dug in motivations changed, and I changed with them. In the beginning I was coming off a winter of serious baby-related and weather-related isolation feeling like no one really knew anyone ever and this was, in part, my awkward attempt to throw caution to the wind and own every crappy, disheartening moment and every absurd situation I’d ever found myself in. As it continued I began to realize how often I’d fucked up as much as everyone else and wanted nothing more than to put it in front of people, stare down my own questions about myself, throw caution to the wind and declare that any shit I carried around in my head didn’t own me. I also thought that by forcing myself to do this every day, I would somehow learn not to procrastinate, not to demand that inspiration come from desperation instead of perspiration, and you know, in that regard, at least, I haven’t learned a thing.

But while those ambitions may have been successful or failed to some degree or another, they didn’t end up being the greatest part of the past year. More than anything what had consistently thrilled me the most is finding that as I rethink a lot of the friendships I’ve had over the years, those friendships have returned, even if it’s just an e-mail or a facebook message, and words can’t describe how cool that is to someone who occasionally has let his own issues wreak such havoc on relationships that he’s lucky to have known such great people. And in some cases, lucky to have known some truly awful people too, because by looking at them looking at me, I don’t mind what I don’t like about myself so much.

I don’t know many people who have read all of these and at my weakest points over the year, the times when I stared at the computer wishing I hadn’t committed myself to doing something so ridiculous, I didn’t think I could endure the idea that no one was paying attention. But in the end some did, which makes me feel great, and more than that this exists, and isn’t going away. Whether people followed it or not while it was going on, I think that it’s still something people can go back to and get something out of it, whether they’re laughing with me or against me. But I am not a man of mystery and while I haven’t copped to every instance of every time I found myself in some fucked-up story waiting to happen, I think I’ve more than made up for 20+ years neglecting to go to confession.

Over a year ago a friend was going through a bit of a rough time and I said to him, “I think the best thing someone can do to help a friend deal with some really rough truth about themselves is to share something so incredibly embarrassing that there’s nothing the other person won’t feel comfortable saying.”

I remain proud and almost fucking shameless and invite anyone who cares, to go along for the ride.

Aly and Kira put up with me never sleeping. Justn D. talking shit at Village Wok made this happen. People I’ve known and people reading kept me inspired.

Thanks.

I picked stories often at random and some nights I was struggling to think of one to tell. Sometimes I was excited and sometimes I was half assed and sometimes I stared at the computer for hours wishing I’d written down the good idea I had a few hours before.

There’s a few stories that I could take or leave and there’s a few stories that are just plan essential and there’s a ton in between; upon review the last year has been one of just as many successes and failures as anyone else’s, except mine are public.

But there’s so much I didn’t get to.

Like the crazy old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere with all the pentagrams spraypainted in the attic and how one night on a rare occasion when Charles and Rob were visiting my town we left them there, hiding, and then dragged a bunch of kids who didn’t know them out there and then freaked out when Charles and Rob slammed doors and made scary noises, basically inventing the conceit behind Blair Witch Project a decade early.

Playing a comic book shop in Columbus OH, not getting paid, and Joe making fun of the owner for trying to make any money off all ages shows and then bailing on the show to go get drunk with Becky & Deirdre.

Cooter Kelly, in explaining what he did for a living when he wasn’t on tour, said, “I’m a carpenter. I carpend.”

We used to do stupid shit in my car, like do drive-bys with a supersoaker out the hatchback, until Johnny tried it on I-75 when I was doing 65 and hit his head, almost falling out of the back, or duct taping smoke bombs to the back bumper and buzzing by dudes in low-ride ground FX trucks with smoke pouring out the back of my car.

My friend Jim from Gainesville, after playing a show with one of my bands in Boston to nobody, got drunk at this Mission Hill party and when we drove to the tip of South Boston in the middle of the night to walk around the fort there surrounded by townies, he opted to pass out but now before announcing that he was “Bit by Count Napula.”

There was this crazy doctor guy in my hometown who, objecting to a neighbor’s decorative millstone in his yard, drunkenly chained it to the back of his pickup truck in the middle of the night and dragged it up and down the same street where I was hit by a car in front of my elementary school.

My friend Julie, Will’s high school ex, called me a month into college to tell me that the women’s group she’d joined was cool at first because they talked about how much guys sucked but at the second meeting the topic was “natural options for your period” and how she couldn’t handle “putting peat moss on my cooter.”

My gramma loved me a lot but being a good German often found me irritating enough to write letters about it to my aunt, including the time when I was four that I locked myself in my room after she made me mad and came out later to announce, “I’m going to stop being mad at you only because I don’t have time to not get along.”

My mom used to call me “the mouse” before I was actually born.

Morgan and Andrew and I breaking into the Harvard Boathouse dock and drinking 40s on the Charles River just to say we could.

Getting my wisdom teeth out and, in the ensuing narcotics hangover, sobbing uncontrollably for hours because everyone I knew was eventually going to die while Aly made me gargle salt water.

Drinking on the bay in Pensacola with Evan and Billie Joe and trying to bike back, drunk, hauling a gigantic stew pot we’d used to make shrimp.

Meeting this guy from Lexington who’d ended up living in New York at a party in Boston because he was friends with Adam Advil’s brother and watching him making a one-hitter by drilling a hole through a baby carrot with a chop stick.

Watching kids in the Keys try to smoke weed through a pipe made out of a cardboard tampon applicator and tin foil.

Getting my tongue pierced in 1994 and swallowing it two weeks later at the Arby’s on Snelling and going crazy trying to figure out if I was going to die before I passed it.

My friend Gretchen stormed out of the kitchen of the Triple Rock and yelled “No more food!” thus cutting me off after I’d tried to order my third meal of the day there.

My friend Sergio, having no clue who he was, getting Grant Hart high in front of Mac’s student union one night because “any friend of Tigger’s can smoke my weed.”

I broke up with my first college girlfriend, Jenni, by blurting out “Do you want the long version or the short version? The short version is I’m dumping you,” which was horrible, because I knew if we talked about it I’d back down and we were well on our way to hating each other as it was.

One time a girl started talking about “niggers” in front of Gabe at the tattoo shop and didn’t know who Hitler was, so he threw her out.

I got annoyed with a whole ton of Drew and Ashley’s bike hippie friends because I’m always depressed and irritable in early March and left Drew’s birthday party in a crew to wander a few blocks further into Lower Allston to Mulls’s house, where he answered the door, then yelled “OUT OF MY WAY, MODS!” and proceeded to spend the night shut in his room listening to Miami Bass Fuck-rap.

I ended up in Nazi Alan’s driveway because Johnny had blown us all off, Gavin smoking and fuming and saying “fucking asshole” with a weight I could not begin to comprehend, and feeling like I didn’t know what I was supposed to do once he’d dragged me there, only to end up leaving unnoticed.

I watched my friend Tino go nose-to-nose with some gangbanger dude in front of First Avenue and say, “Shoot me, if you can!” and the kid backing down and leaving.

And probably a ton more. But the second-to-last night, I shouldn’t forget this:

Driving home from the bar one night when we lived in Frogtown, where we had to deal with the block-by-block shifts in community safety although the worst we had to endure was some crack whores arguing about money at the end of our block. I was more than a little drunk, so I made the left turn off University onto Victoria very slow, as a woman no more than four feet tall, a straight-up midget, stepped off the corner and started yelling “Hey honey, you want a good time?” She rushed up to my open driver’s side window and as I accelerated, I watched her head bob up and down as she yelled “Baby! I’ll suck your dick!” each word punctuated by her trying to jump up so I could see her face out my window, then disappearing.

More than a little distressed, I was further annoyed when no one I told about this believed me, and it wasn’t until months later that Bama Dave was with me when we experienced a repeat sighting of Saint Paul’s proudest midget street walker.

It is late and I am tired and tomorrow’s will be coming hopefully mid-day but as it is the last, it will definitely fall on March 11th, the 365th day.

Summer 1993 trickled to its inevitable end in a way that made me sad. I’d never said goodbye to friends before, and I wanted some big, cinematic, profound moment that simply never came. I’m Catholic and I crave ceremony and significance, and I’ve admitted before that I stay at parties way to late fighting the end of the evening because I’m waiting for something awesome to happen. I’ve never stopped looking for those moments in the 16 years since, artificially creating them with mixtapes and going away parties and promises to keep up until you realize that the people who will stick by you are going to pick right up where you left off. But closure is just slow dying, people fading out of the picture.

I got up that Saturday morning running late for work as usual, a theme that I’ve managed to maintain ever since. It was another day of the noon to midnight shift at the conveyor belt factory, sitting in the guard shack reading ahead for my college classes and listening to pop-punk on my walkman in this dorky blue and grey uniform. The guy who did the midnight to noon shift, always a dick, grumbled about me being late and left, and I went through my usual routine–music, books, patrol every two hours, and stealing the quarters from the newspaper vending machine, never locked, in front of the factory so I could buy some dinner out of the vending machines. Today, though, I had another task–I had to figure out how to get to Molly’s going away party when I was supposed to be working.

Molly was smart and awesome and a pain in the ass who I’d known since Quiz Bowl team in middle school. Most all times I liked her even if I didn’t always act like it and sometimes I hated dealing with her because she was a lousy drunk the way I would have been a lousy drunk if I hadn’t been straightedge, and have frankly been a lousy drunk in the years since. In this way, she was no different than any other fucked up kid in my town, except that she wasn’t quite as good at hiding it, which of course is a fundamental small-town sin. Small towns are everyone making the same mistakes and sinking or swimming on how well we cover them up. So it was pretty amazing that Molly had, in the course of that summer, quit the getting wasted lifestyle and gotten into this exchange program to France. I think at the time me and the rest of the overly judgemental straightedge boys took some credit for that. In afterthought I think Molly just proved to be pretty badass.

So, here at the end of the summer, Molly was getting a going-away party that was guaranteed to be packed with the same wasted kids who always went to parties, and I was stuck working.

Drew was gone. He was off to school, some outdoor orientation thing. Jeremy and Josh, Eric and Fraggle Mark, they were all rolling down from Lexington. Will was around. But I wanted to be there because I wanted to support Molly and say goodbye and really, I just hate missing parties.

After about seven hours in my box, as the sun went down, I came up with my solution: I’d get Dudley, who was in town for a couple more weeks before his senior year of college, to come cover my shift. I had to do a 10:00 PM patrol and then I could bust out, leaving Dudley in the guard shack just in case, and as long as I was back by 11:30 no one would know the difference. This was a terrible plan, just terrible, on so many levels, the fact that I was asking Dudley to do something really stupid being only the beginning. He of course said yes.

“Ok, thanks for hanging out, just, if anyone asks, tell them you work here. I’ll be back in a bit.”

Dud shrugged. “Whatever.”

So I went to the party. Folks were hanging out. Us sober types sat outside and smoked if we smoked and my drunk peers acted a little weird and Molly played an excellent, if somewhat stressed, hostess. I stood around in my uniform pants looking like a doofus, made some small talk with Molly’s mom, thanked God I was leaving in a week, and wished Drew was there, because it felt wrong without him.

But that’s how it was, things just faded out. Drew was gone. Amber, Hope, Julie–all gearing up to go and they owed my town’s social scene a lot more than I did, much to my consternation. Becky and Deirdre and Gavin were doing their own transitions in their own town. After a good stretch of hanging out again, Johnny had faded out to a world of canned beer and assholes like Alan the white supremacist I couldn’t bear to be in the same room with, a choice I put entirely on him, fair or unfair. Will still had two years left. So did Molly. But when she talked about six months away, she looked happier than I’d ever seen her.

All that self-indulgent navel gazing made me lose track of time. 11:35. “Shit, I gotta get back to work! I’ll swing back by after midnight!”

I jumped in my car and roared off, the same way I’d roar off a few years later when we were all back to drinking. My job was on the entirely other side of town, and I had to hoof it. I managed a couple lucky breaks on stoplights and did 15 over the limit the whole way there. It was dark and a Saturday night in a dry county, so I figured I’d be ok, and I was, until I was pulling into the front gate of the factory and the cop who’d been tailing me the last mile threw on his lights.

Textbook: “You know how fast you were going?” ‘No, blah blah,” until we got to why exactly I was driving so fast, and suddenly I had to come up with a convincing story as to why I was off my security post.

“Um, I had to run an errand so I had my partner in there cover for me,” I said. “Just ask him, he’ll tell you he works here.”

The cop went over to the guard shack. “Hey,” he said to Dudley, “you work here?”

Dudley looked up from his book. “Nope.”

So the cop yelled at me and threatened to take me to jail and I apologized and he gave me a warning and a lecture about ditching my post and left it at that. It was 11:53 at this point and the midnight guy was showing up in two minutes, so I ushered Dudley out and tidied up the shack just in time for the dick to show up.

“Well, goodnight!” I said, and drove back across town, the speed limit this time, to Molly’s party. When I got back I ducked inside

By the time I’d returned, Ken had shown up, shitty drunk, and trouble was brewing. Ken was Johnny’s former neighbor, the kid who’d worked a newspaper route every day since he was ten and was sitting on a small fortune, part of which he’d loaned to Johnny so Johnny could go on our road trip. When we were kids he was in all the same nerd classes I was in, but seemed to have the same sort of struggle I did with what that all meant 10 years later. He dreamed of being a filmmaker and once spent several hours explaining every symbolic color scheme in Heathers to me, in this weird, tired monotone that made me worried and impressed. This was the only time we’d ever hung out. Most of the time he was sort of a dick to me. He’d moved up from paper routes to working at the local Piggly Wiggly a couple years before At some point–I can’t remember if it was before or after this–Ken took all his money and lived in a hotel in LA for a few weeks, going to studio tours and trying to ask for jobs. It was an amazing piece of reaching for the sky that my family bred Midwestern Irish-German pragmatism found offensive, since I’d never have the balls to do it myself. People said Ken was crazy like they said Molly was crazy or I was crazy: “crazy” being a measure of how poorly you hid how fucked-up you felt, and maybe in his case they were right on.

Ken had pulled up in his car and stumbled out, disheveled, incapable of walking. He spent most of the time he was there laying on a big rock in Molly’s front yard, talking, sometimes talking shit, sometimes asking for a drink, sometimes just not making any sense. “Hey Ken,” Jeremy spoke up, “why don’t you just sit down and sober up?”

“Sober up? Man, fuck you,” Ken said. “If people DON’T WANT ME here, I can LEAVE.” He got up.

“No Ken, no one wants you to leave,” I said. “You’re just really wasted, and maybe you shouldn’t be driving.”

“Definitely not driving,” said Eric.

“Man, whatever, fuck you guys” Ken said, swaying, then sat back down. We went back to hanging out, talking shit, him muttering about how we were assholes and who the fuck were we. It was easy to ignore and that’s just what we did, for a while. Suddenly, Ken leaped to his feet and ran for his car.

“What the fuck? KEN, DON’T DRIVE ANYWHERE!” someone yelled. Ken was yanking his car door open, fumbling for his keys. We all got up. “Someone’s gotta stop him,” I said.

We all jumped up and ran to the road. Ken, seeing us, started his engine and stomped on the gas. Tonight was apparently the night for dramatic exits. Mark, parked right there, took off to follow him. Mark was parked right there, and drove after him. Josh, Eric, Jeremy, and I piled into my car. It was getting cool and fog was rolling in off the lake nearby, and it was hard to see as we drove through Molly’s subdivision. I kept my eyes peeled for any sign of Ken, but nothing. Suddenly, Mark appeared in the middle of the road.

“I ran off the road onto the golf course and almost ditched in a water hazard!” he yelled. “Follow me!” He started running down the road, bathed in my headlights as we followed him down the road, laughing in spite of the situation. I dropped everyone but Eric off to push him out, then we kept driving, looking for Ken. Up ahead of us, his taillights flashed as he pulled out onto the highway, the back end of his car sliding in gravel.

I followed, trying to catch up. I didn’t think for a moment that Ken was trying to outrace us and we were just making it worse. All I knew was that we needed to stop him before he killed himself or someone else.

I stepped on the gas on the little two-lane highway, hitting 75, when we came around a bend and saw Ken’s car finishing a spin off the road, running rear-end into a rock embankment, the same sort of wall that Sean Stevens and I had nosed into months before on a rainy day. In afterthought, Ken was lucky he has spun out; if he’d hit the wall head on, he’d be dead. As it was, we watched the last sad seconds of his car bouncing off the wall and coming to a halt halfway into the road.

I stopped and threw on my hazards, then ran to see if Ken was ok. To my (and Eric’s) amazement, he was unharmed.

“Oh fuck, man. How’s my car?”

The rear end was completely crumpled. One back wheel was bent to a weird angle, 45 degrees against the car. “It’s fucked,” Eric said.

Ken looked at the damage. “No, this is no big deal. I’m gonna tell you what I’m gonna do. I’ll drive this home and back it up against my house, and my dad will never notice. Seriously.”

By this point Mark’s car, safely out of the water hazard, pulled up. “Ken, there is no way in hell that will work, and you aren’t driving your car. Just shut the fuck up and give one of us the keys.”

“Ok, he breathed.” Another car drove by. “Let’s get this to Piggly Wiggly and we’ll deal with it there.

So somehow, Eric drove Ken’s car, broken rear axle and all, the last mile to Piggly Wiggly, me with Ken behind him, talking his ear off about how he could handle all this and how we were assholes, the rest of the guys behind us. We got to Piggly Wiggly and parked the car. We’d been there about five minutes when the cops showed up, called by the person who drove by us.

“Oh shit!” Ken said, and ran to the back to go hide.

I was furious. We were all really shaken and now he’d ditched us to deal with the cops.

So there we were, all leaning against the customer service counter of Piggly Wiggly, when the cop came in and said, “I’m looking for Ken.” Because of course, he’d run the plate.

We shrugged. “In back,” I said.

So Ken came out, and said, “No officer, I wasn’t drunk and I wasn’t driving, you can ask these guys,” and I got so mad my eyes lit up. The cop turned to us and said, “Is this true?”

“Nope.” I said. “Sorry, Ken, but I’m not covering for you.”

Everyone else just shook their head. He didn’t know any of these guys, and he was busted no matter what we said, and there was no way any of us were going to bat for him.

Still, I couldn’t help but feel a little bad as the cop cuffed him and put him in the back of the second car that arrived. Ken stared at me, this hatefully lucid look on his face, out the side window as the squad pulled away. The cop returned with stacks of paper. “I’m going to have to keep you here for reports.”

So, bumming a smoke off Josh, I took a deep breath and started talking. We all stood there, the cop leaning against a garbage can, and explained what had happened as best we could, leaving out the whole part about Mark and the water hazard. It took about fifteen minutes.

“Okay, boys,” the cop said. “Anything else?”

Suddenly, Josh blurted: “Can I play with your gun?”

The cop just looked at him, shook his head, “Boy, NO.”

He drove off. I bummed another smoke and watched him drive away. “I guess we gotta go back to tell Molly what happened,” I said. We piled in our cars and left Ken’s crumpled heap in the parking lot. As we pulled away I was suddenly struck with the sense that I didn’t really live there anymore, that this night may have completely ended my connection.

The party was over by the time we got back to Molly’s.

When I fall I fall hard, wide-eyed and eager to please, like a little fucking kid. I won’t pretend otherwise, I bear all the basic neuroses that lead a guy to not only act like he doesn’t give a fuck, but invest time in energy into actually, honestly, not doing so. This is not a rare trait, which is why it’s so easy to inspire people, because real life is drab and dreary, and people are looking to be inspired.

That’s how I felt the day I entered teacher training.

It was late in my grad school life, after I’d already decided to drop out, after my application to a different school had been rejected, after I’d been turned down for what had seemed like a really awesome public television job in what was the most frustrating interview process I’ve ever experienced, that I first noticed the signs on the subway. “INTERESTED IN TEACHING? $10,000 SIGNING BONUS!” The little pull-off tabs with the number for information were gone, so I vowed to go home that day and look it up, and dammit, I did, I actually followed through for once, because a teaching job and a $10K signing bonus seemed like a pretty kickass deal, a little piece of destiny to balance out the fact that I was about a month away from being an unemployed grad school dropout.

It was a state program called “Massachusetts Institute for New Teachers” (or MINT) that gave people $10,000 if they went through a summer intensive teacher training program and stuck teaching out for four years. Sadly, I found out that the program had already closed applications for the year, but I was welcome to apply for the next year. (Due to my poor timing, I narrowly missed being in the program with my future bandmate and former internet enemy Morgan.) Reality: 1, Destiny: goose egg.

Still, I decided this sounded cool and stuck with it. Lots of teachers were hitting retirement age so it seemed like a guaranteed positive job market. I talked to a couple friends who thought I’d make a good teacher. I was good with kids and quick on my feet and figured I could relate to them and work with them. It seemed sort of exciting, and really, I went to grad school because I liked the idea of knowing something so well that you could stand up in front of other people and get them to know it as well. (This is, of course, is not an attitude that breeds success in graduate school.) But it seemed like I could be that cool teacher like the cool teachers I had in high school, like Mr. Franklin, my biology teacher, who rode a motorcycle and had a big beard and a shaved head and called everyone by their last name because he expected the same from us. Suddenly I had a plan again, and all the malaise, all the feelings of failure, went back down into their ugly little hiding hole in the pit of my stomach.

The next year I applied to this program the same time Aly applied to midwifery school–she hated working in an office as much as anyone I’ve ever seen, myself included, and I saw her a lot because she got me a crap job at the same place. I did a little freelancing on the side but I really didn’t give a fuck about getting ahead because I was locked into this program. There was no way they were going to reject me–I was born for this. I went through a group interview and a personal interview. I talked about mutual respect and mentioned Mr. Franklin. I felt like I was knocking everything out of the park. This shit was a lock.

Until I got my rejection letter. That wasn’t really a rejection letter.

It was poorly worded. It didn’t make sense, and second and third attempts at reading it didn’t make it better, not that I wass the best audience. I mean, it was a rejection letter. I wasn’t seeing the whole thing–just the rejection. I received it when we got home on Friday afternoon, so by the time I opened it the state education office was closed and I couldn’t call to ask them what exactly the fuck they were doing turning me down. So I moped and drank all weekend and called on Monday. 

The response I got was something in the realm of “oh, whoops, our bad!” which is pretty apologetic by MassHole standards. It turned out that they had made a change to the program and were now only granting the $10K to a few people, so the rejection letter was telling me a was turned down for the money, not the program. Unfortunately, they’d written such a ridiculously unclear letter to inform people that the money and the program were separate selection processes that it looked like a flat rejection. I was not the only person to have made the mistake, and presumably, not the only pissed-off call. Either way, I breathed a sigh of relief. I was still in the running. A few weeks later I found out that I ran well enough to get in.

(An aside about the money: it was originally intended as an incentive for people making a career change to be a teacher and in part defray the summer you spent not making any money. Ironically, everybody I met who had gotten the money, good, bad, ugly, seemed to be fresh out of college.)

I arrived the first day at some convention room in a hotel in some western suburb of Boston armed with a note pad and a pen, dressed in reasonably nice casual clothes, ready for opening day of the next stage of my life. The first day was one of a few mass meetings during the two month program. Most of the time we were going to be in small groups within our regions, but that first day was a huge deal, with a special speaker. I registered, went through that awkward moment with the name tag with my never-used first name or my adopted middle name. Five minutes meant outside, where caught a smoke, and then went into this giant meeting room with hundreds of other people, all eager, all wide-eyed, all ready to fix what ailed the education system. And that’s where we all met Erin G, Ms. G as she was called, our first teacher.

She was young. She was hyped. She was excited. She was a teacher from the worst school in LA and had been thrown to the wolves in an uncaring system, given the worst kids, the kids everyone had given up on, and she’d cracked that code, opened that safe, busted that nut, by being smart and confident and imaginative, by being creative and fun and really understanding where these kids came from, by giving them a voice through writing. She was fired up, and we all got fired up, too.

She didn’t come alone. A couple of her former students came as well, a black guy and a Latino girl, and you could tell they used to be hard the way they joked about how Ms. G was just another white bitch to them until she touched their lives. She taught them about racial prejudice and the Holocaust and that made them see how fucked up hate was. By doing this, she taught them for four years and got them all into college, and now they were talking about making a movie about her starring Gwenyth Paltrow.

Ms. G showed us how she made the students have fun by picking out the biggest, most surly kid–her “Chief,” she called that kid, like Chief from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest–and turning him into a positive leader for the rest of the group. She showed us how to play bingo with generic Froot Loops because kids. She showed us a bunch of other games that had turned the kids from school-hating, dope-slanging fuckups to believers in their own future. Better than all of this, though, she and her class had gathered together all of their journals–some of which her former students read out loud to us–and published them in a book, where you could read their actual journals, from when they hated Ms. G to when they hit the end of their road completely new people. When she picked me out of the crowd to be her chief for one game, she gave me a free copy, but they were also available for purchase. The name of Ms. G’s class’s book was “The Freedom Writers Diary.”

“And on your last day,” she beamed, “I’ll be back to congratulate you on your wonderful, successful summer of becoming teachers!”

The next day went a little differently.

We got divided into small groups and immediately set to work. We had a week or two to get the basics down before we were going to be thrown in to the mix, all assigned student teaching jobs to summer school kids. Each of us got a binder course curriculum and readings about 300 pages long. None of those pages mentioned anything about Froot Loop bingo or “Chiefs.”

Small group intensive learning situations like this are designed to bring out an immediate, loyal intimacy in its members, so believe me when I say that you would not find a finer group of human beings walking the planet than my crew. There were a few kids who had just graduated college for whom this looked like a better option than Americorps or a similar program. There were a few older folks, people who had gotten tired of their jobs as office slaves or scientists or computer techs or, in one case, a corrections officer. There were a couple of us right in the middle, and there was our team leader, a woman a couple years older than me named LeighAnn, who was entrusted with being our teacher, our advocate, our counselor, and our shoulder to cry on for the summer. There were quirks and some extremities of personality, like the one woman in particular talked so much off topic and annoyed us to the point that weeks into the program I theorized that she was a plant meant to galvanize us, but for all of out trash-talk we’d have taken on a moving bus for her just as much as anyone.

But all that stuff about Chiefs and fun and games and tricking kids into liking you and getting them to express themselves to understand how to love one another? Yeah, LeighAnn chucked that shit out the window on day two. It just took a little while for it to sink in.

We showed up to Charlestown High to meet in classrooms. We worked. We toiled. We talked about classroom management techniques over and over again because we were all going to be working at a middle school in the middle of Roxbury all morning and then having four hours of class in the afternoons across the road at this giant mostrosity called Madison Park (Mad Park, yo!) I would come to know all too well a year later. We talked about scope and sequence and lesson planning and educational goals until I never wanted to see the phrase “The Student Will Be Able To…” ever again. And as we did, Ms. G and her kids and their book weren’t quite so inspiring any more.

I tried to crack the book three times in those few few days and immediately was struck by how heavily edited it seemed on the page. The stories the two kids had read during the first day were from the middle, but the early journal entries, when these kids supposedly were functionally illiterate, they all seemed to be a little too pat, a little too predictable. Every one was “This new yeacher is a bitch and here’s who I am and my feelings.” I couldn’t get into it.

We started student teaching and immediately got a new factor–the teacher we were learning from in the classroom, who was constantly working with LeighAnn to bust us into shape. And we needed it. My first class I–who had excelled at the classroom management drills we’d done because I thought on my feet well and was used to dealing with unruly drunk adults–tried to do the “fun” thing like Ms. G had shown us that first day in that safe-feeling convention center, and I got eaten alive. Kids, it seemed, were not interested in becoming responsible, empowered individuals in the course of a day. And for me, I doubted everything I’d thought about teaching for the first timem because a room full of seventh graders had en masse collectively asked me how their ass taste.

It was around this time that I attempted to read The Freedom Writers Diary for the last time, and decided that it had to be bullshit because there wasn’t a journal entry that just said “You suk you suk you suk you suk you suk suk suk.” We all came to realize that our first day hadn’t been education. It had been motivational speaking, a travelling show where Ms. G would go all around the country, spin the story of Chiefs and games, trott out her former students for ghetto cred and sell some books, then pack up the wagon and hit the next town. 

Slowly but surely she crumbled before us. Mornings were spent stopping twelve year olds from branding themselves by rubbing pencil erasers super-fast on their forearms and trying to plan lessons that somehow prepared for anything, from the normally cheerful kid refusing to do anything to birds flying in the window of the unairconditioned classrooms in the middle of heatwaves. Afternoons were spent reviewing our mistakes and figuring our how to get better, LeighAnn guiding and suggesting, encouraging and criticizing as need be. Nights we still had readings to do. Somehow, though, we found downtime to catch beers and poke holes in Ms. G’s story.

If she was such an awesome teacher, why’d she quit after four years? How exactly had she managed to keep the same class of kids all four years? What exactly was going one there? One by one, we all gave up on that dream she’d painted the first day.

Some people gave up on her fast and talking shit was more of a fun enterprise. Some people took it really personally. A couple people beat themselves up because nothing Ms. G had talked about seemed to work and they felt like failures. The woman who talked constantly, who was sort of a hippie-artist type anyway, tried to keep the faith long after the rest of us, but even she, after a few weeks, said, “I really think, that nothing we learned that first day, actually works. I mean, why tell us that it will when it just won’t?”

And so it was to each other, LeighAnn included, that we learned to look for inspiration. We went out after class and got drunk. We talked about kids being crazy like it wasn’t a thing. We got tough. We got passionate. We argued with administrators for some of our kids when the kids needed it and came down like hammers on other kids when they needed that, too. We never got cynical–there simply wasn’t enough time–but we sure as hell didn’t have time for anyone’s bullshit.

And then it was the last day, another drive to another convention hall, and it smelled like bullshit. As a group we strolled into the room surly, in a pack, dogs from the yard, taking our time. We all grabbed a table by the back of the room. We weren’t the only ones sticking to the back tables by the time Ms. G hit the stage.

A couple of us had flasks. We sipped booze on the DL and passed a notepad around, passing notes making fun of the whole thing. I couldn’t help but be fascinated by how different Ms. G seemed this time around, and realized the change we’d all gone through was profound. She talked the same sort of talk that had gotten everyone so amped a few weeks before, and got a collective yawn from the back of the room.

We played that game where you write a line of a story and pass it to the person next to you. It made fun of Ms. G’s speech. We all scoffed at the people in the program from suburbs and Western Mass towns who got up and talked about what a success all the games they’d learned the first day had been with their mostly white, mostly middle-class students. We laughed out loud at the wrong times sometimes. The crew next to us, friendly rivals from the same student teaching setting, laughed along with us, even the guy who based his teaching philosophy around Sun Tzu. We joked about sneaking out and going to drink. Bad attitude kids in the back of the class, one and all.

During a break I went outside to smoke and missed some good stuff off microphone, out of the mass eye. Apparently one of the team leaders, paid employee of the program like LeighAnn, had confronted Ms. G and asked her when the fun and games were over, where was the teaching that she’d actually done? Her former student, the girl, responded by telling the guy to shut the fuck up and threatening to kick his ass. “FUCK, I missed that?” I asked. It was sort of validating, really, like when the curtain was pulled aside the wizard really was just a man tricking everyone, like I’d guessed.

After the dog and pony show we went back to one of our crew’s apartments and drank. The 22 year olds drank. The 52 year olds drank. We all got drunk and talked about shit that had happened during the summer, then shit we’d done before, then shit we were worried about for our future as teachers. We did shots and played I Never. We stayed late. When we were done we skipped handshakes for hugs and refusing as best we could to let what we’d had come to end, even if it was inevitable.

I taught for three years–one short of Ms. G–and counseled kids for another year and a half, and didn’t get a book or movie deal out of it. I did manage something similar to a nervous breakdown along the way. A week into my first year planes crashed into the World Trade Center and the world changed. Education budgets were slashed. I went from feeling like I had a guaranteed job for life to getting laid off due to budget cuts after my first year. Conservative leaders who made bad education policy got into power on the back of national tragedy. 

Kids got in fights. Kids told me to fuck off. Kids cracked me up. I realized I didn’t have anything figured out nearly enough. At Chelsea I ran from classroom to classroom and could barely keep up. At Mad Park, my worst kids stayed my worst kids, but some of my undermotivated kids did good work when I let them stick around playing GameCube on my TV. When I started there everyone ran out of my door laughing at me the first day. I cried. I When I left they broke into the science classroom, stole a cardboard Science Fair display, and made me a gigantic going away card. I cried. In Pensacola, I went through bomb threats and had parents yell at me, watched kids go through the awful trauma of having to go through puberty at different paces before my eyes, and, knowing we were moving at the end of the year, just tried to do right by the kids and have some fun. I found out that I’d have to go back to school to get my certification credentials recognized in Minnesota and didn’t. They expired for both states a couple years ago, right around the time that the Freedom Writers movie finally came out, starring Hilary Swank in the role Gwenyth Paltrow once wanted to play. It didn’t do very well.

I’m not entirely sure two months and a summer school session is enough to prepare someone for one of the hardest, least respected professions in the country. I wasn’t a particularly good teacher on a lot of days, and that wasn’t Ms. G’s fault. I was a particularly great teacher on some days, and I owe all of that to my crew. But when all is said and done I think about how I felt when I realized how much of her story was medicine show and I thank her for showing all of us that the finest thing you can do is walk into a room with clear eyes and hearts and the crucial willingness to cut the shit.

Our very first time in New Orleans together Aly and I got shitty drunk because I am the sort of person who doesn’t mind doing the most obvious thing as long as I remember that it’s not the only thing.

Of course, if you actually live in New Orleans, as Bama Dave’s friend Frances did, then you are morally obligated to discuss the fact that there are way better bars to drink in outside of the French Quarter and they’re not mobbed by tourists. But you know, sometimes I like to see what sort of trouble I can get into, what sort of spectacle I might bear witness. I’m not saying this is a good thing.

Dave and Aly and I had all driven down in a single shot and having napped off our exhaustion this was out big night to go be as dumb as humanly possible. Dave and Frances wanted to hang out in a non-tourist capacity so we made a deal to meet up later after Aly and I wandered the streets absorbing the sheer dumbness of it all. Plans made, we went, we saw, we drank.

The booze made all the behavior around us seem utterly silly instead of repulsive, which was the goal. (It helped that, like tattoo artists in Pensacola doomed to slap tribal armbands on Navy dudes day after day, bartenders in New Orleans recognize when you aren’t a tourist asshole, and tend to be extra nice accordingly. We beered at Monaghan’s. We drank upstairs at some place that was serving this ridiculous grape concoction straight out of an Igloo cooler. We walked the streets laughing.

Still, I was well aware of the standard New Orleans townie complaint about the dominance and annoying reality of the huge tourism draw, and was sort of shocked to an eyebrow-raising degree at the number of dudes wandering the streets with video cameras, hoping and praying to be the next Joe Francis. It was like the postmodern deconstruction of partying: “Jesus,” I griped, “there’s so many fucking assholes waiting to tape someone getting drunk and acting like an idiot that there’s no one to actually get drunk and act like an idiot.” (This trend only got worse on successive trips, hitting its bottom, at least that I personally witnessed, when I watched a couple frat guys cajole some 40+ white trash lady into licking some other drunk dude’s cock in the middle of Bourbon Street so they could film it.) But Aly and I were having fun and laughing and I joked that we should go check out the strip bar “Big Daddy’s,” which is the one that had the plastic motorized legs that swung in and out of the front wall and the sign that said, “No Cover! Topless and Bottomless Girls! Drinks start at $4!”

DANGER! RED BATS!

As we walked in, I noticed that the one “bottomless” girl was actually laying on her stomach on a shelf near the front door, naked ass exposed, with a curtain covering the rest of her body, picking her nails and flipping through a magazine. We took a seat near the stage and the glass that separated it from the audience, and a waitress popped up.

“Are vodka cranberries $4?” asked Aly.

The waitress shook her head. “Honey, $4 gets you the house special. Mixed drinks start at 9 bucks.”

“What’s in a house special?” I asked.

“Red wine, 7-Up, and a splash of tabasco sauce,” she said.

Aly made a horrified face. “Give me a vodka cranberry!”

The waitress turned to me. “I’ll have the house special.”

Big Daddy’s was mostly boring, and the dancers looked mostly bored. I sipped my godawful concoction and Aly drank her vodka cranberry, which was all of five ounces. About halfway through the third song, she announced, “I have to go to the bathroom!”

She was gone a while. I didn’t make much of a dent in my House Special. When she returned, she had this pissed look on her face. “Did you know that they make the girls PAY to dance here?” she asked. I didn’t. “Not only that, but their dressing room is THE WOMEN’S ROOM. I just spent the last ten minutes talking to them. It’s the shittiest thing I’ve ever heard!” Her eyes were all lit up with some righteous rage. “Those girls need to stand up for themselves!”

It being almost time to met up with Dave, we left soon after, Aly still in shock. We walked out the front door into the street, and there before us, we saw a sadly typical French Quarter sight: four or five drunk guys, all close-talking women and demanding that they party. In this particular moment, they’d actually surrounded a woman who seemed a little bit drunk, and it seemed like they were actually keeping her from going along her way.

Aly’s eyes lit up. “Hey you, yeah, assholes!” She strode straight to the boys, not a pause of doubt in her step. “Why don’t you leave the girl alone!”

“Oh shit,” I thought, and I followed.

Aly started reading these dudes the riot act, and I mean, she laid into them. I joined and pulled the drunk girl aside, surprised to see her straighten up into a sober posture. “You ok?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Sometimes it’s easier to act really drunk to get these guys to leave you alone.”

Aly kept going. One of the guys made the mistake of turning to me and saying, “You should get your girl under control,” which didn’t fly. “Just fucking back off, you crazy bitch,” another of the guys said. Things were getting a little tense and as I watched her like I’d never seen her before, just laying these guys out, I realized that she was pushing these dudes to a point that was about to get really ugly. I also realized that the girl we’d “rescued” had made herself scarce. “You need to shut up or someone might make you,” a dude said. Fists were getting clenched. I reached to my belt and slipped the knife on my belt into my hand, realizing the moment I did it that we were maybe a little too drunk to be handling this and should get out of there.

Before I could say as much, though, suddenly the entire scene was interrupted by this kid who’d dropped out of our college the year before running up to the whole scene and saying, “Tigger, Aly, what are you doing here?”

“Hey, man, what’s up?” I said. At that moment I could not, for the life of me, remember his name. “Uh, can you just, uh, move a foot this way?” I asked, pulling him out of my way.

“Yeah, hey, crazy seeing you here! I go to Sarah Lawrence now, it’s cool…” He stopped, and looked at Aly. “Hey, whoa, what’s going on here?”

This moment was about when Aly was saying something about “macho frat boy homoerotic antics” or something and I was desperate to find a way to end this. It was also the moment here Dave blithely strolled up with Frances, and said, “Hey, what’s going on, whoa, Aly’s yelling at somebody?”

And that’s all it took. Suddenly there were three dudes, two of them pretty big, and the numbers looked bad for our frat boy friends, and the intimidation games dropped. “Yeah yeah, fuck you,” they said, and wandered off.

“ASSHOLES!” Aly yelled, and I felt my chest relax. I slipped the knife back on my belt, then gave Aly a hug. “Macho ASSHOLES!” she yelled one more time. Dave and Frances and the Sarah Lawrence kid just looked completely confused.

“Ok, wait,” said Dav. “What the hell just happened?”

“That’s what I’M trying to figure out!” said Sarah Lawrence.

My brother has always loved planes as much as I am scared of heights. When we were little my parents had friends from Minnesota who actually flew in their single-engine plane to Kentucky to visit. We all thought that was the coolest thing in the world. When we got to take a ride in the plane we all took it, the sudden whoosh of my stomach turning to liquid as I realized just how unsafe being off the ground leading to some extreme regret. At the end of the flight, I can imagine Mike cheering, but I just stopped and petted the plane’s side.

“Good plane,” I whispered. “Thank you.”

Health fear never hurt anyone.

So when my brother was fifteen and I was seven, there was an air show south of our town, on the same field where our parents had landed, and for his Eagle Scout project he volunteered the troop to clean up garbage. That meant all of us went, not to pick up litter, but to be a part of the big family outing.

I don’t remember anything about the airshow except that it was noisy. I am sure I thought it was cool some of the time and boring other times. I may have even helped Mike pick up litter. But everything about the day has been wiped from my mind by what happened next.

A pilot with the air show offered, after everything was done, to take Mike and a few other scouts up. I think my fear of heights was trumped by my need to be part of everything, so I immediately jumped at the chance to go too. Mike go the front seat and I squeezed in the middle of the back between two older boys.

Everything was cool at first, and then the pilot started to act a little weird. “Let’s see what this plane can do,” he announced, not giving us much chance for discussion. Suddenly we were tipping to one side and the next as he started fucking around, then he pulled the plane into a steep climb. I started to get scared, really scared, as we went higher and higher and higher. I reached for something to hold on to.

“Stop touching me!” exclaimed the boy to my right, whose name was Steven. He tried to pull my hand off his forearm. “Stop!”

But I didn’t stop. This was getting scary. All I could see pasy Mike’s shoulders ahead were clouds. We were heading straight up, it felt like, like soon we’d be on our way to the moon.

And that’s when it happened. “Watch this,” the pilot said. He leveled the plan mostly off, and then tipped the nose forward, very slowly, and then STALLED THE ENGINE.

“Here WE GO!” shouted the pilot. The plane dropped forward like the front car in a rollercoaster. I screamed.

“Ow STOP GRABBING ME!!!!” shouted Steven, but I couldn’t hear because I was crying and screaming too loud. Instead, I grabbed on harder.

We dropped and dropped and I couldn’t tell how fast the ground was coming at us because it wasn’t about dying, it was about that feeling of dropping, the world pulled out from underneath you, falling and completely out of control, and I HATED it, and all I could do was maintain my death grip on Steven’s arm.

“STOP GRABBING ME!!!” he yelled and started to pull at my fingers. No luck.

This went on for what felt like a full hour.

“STOP!”

“AAAAUUGUUGHGHGGHHHHHHHHHHH!”

In front of me, the ground coming up towards us fast, the pilot threw a switch. THe engine shuddered, then kicked back on, and he pulled us out of the stalled dive.

“OH GOD LET ME OUT LET ME OUT” I sobbed.

“LET GO OF MY ARM!”

But I didn’t, and I wouldn’t, not until we landed. Once we had stopped moving I got out as fast as I could, behind Mike and Steven, tears rolling down my face, my folks half-laughing as they saw how sad I was. It wasn’t funny.

Steven knew. He was off to the side, rubbing his arm with his other hand, and when he took it away we all saw the clear black-and-blue print of a little hand holding on to anything, anyone, because he was suffering a fate worse than death.

Here was the fundamental issue with the fucked-up kid factory: It was divided up into a series of units that served various ages for various reasons. My unit was the intake unit, which meant that about 99% of the kids pulled out of their home in Hennepin County, for any reason, at any hour, got to spend some time in my unit. The time was supposed to be about 8 hours, and then they got moved to another unit in the building or another agency somewhere else.

But, and what a very big but it is, we were the only part of this whole elaborate system, internal or external, that had the contract with Hennepin County. Kids came to us because that was the deal. So what happened when we got a kid that no one else would take?

When I started, it was not an issue. Carl and everyone else used to joke about some of the crap they used to have to deal with, but outside of teen mothers, we didn’t have anyone stay long term. Teen moms stayed because there weren’t any other locations equipped to handle moms and babies together. Sometimes we’d get a particularily crazy mom, but other than that, it was all triage and finding another spot for them.

Then, somewhere along the line, everything fell apart.

First of all, there was like a firesale on child molesters. I don’t know what motivates a fifteen-year-old boy to molest little kids, and months, literally months of being in their proximity didn’t help. You know what sucks? When you work in a unit that gets tons of little kids all the time and it’s your job to keep the child molester who both hates and sexualizes you away from the kids. “Fuck you cocksucker you want to fucking rape me fat white BITCH.”

Molesters are, by their nature, skilled manipulators and of the two that we were saddled with at different times (and one deeply uncomfortable overlap), they exercised this manipulation very differently. J, the one mentioned above, was constantly playing staff against each other in this tirely obvious way while trying to incite rebellions with the otherwise peaceful kids who were around at a given time. The other kid, D, was more subtle, sort of weird and charming. He claimed Gangster Disciples very quietly and was in total denial about his creepy habits, so much so that you had to pay close attention. I took him to see Star Wars once, and had to stop him from following a couple little kids to the bathroom.

“I just gotta go pee,” he said.

“Pee later.”

Once these floodgates opened, though, units in-house and other agencies realized that they could just turn down the worst of the worst and leave them with us. If a kid was suicidal, he stayed. Violent? Stayed. Serious socialization disorders? Stayed. 14 year old crack whore everyone else was sick of? Stayed.

And the job became miserable, and nothing I did from day to day made it any better. On one of J’s visits–at least 4 times while I was there–he tried to hit me with a mop handle. Another time this girl with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome hit me in the head and face with a wooden crutch and then sobbed and screamed about rape when I put her in a hold. One time a deaf girl with some suicide issues stayed with us for a month and listened to the same R. Kelly song every morning at full volume over and over again. She was a delight except when suddenly she’d be a completely different person. At a reunion with her brother and parents after several weeks with us she freaked out and threw cake at her family and Carl and called them all motherfuckers.

Ultimately, the biggest problem was that our long-termers, even the sweet ones who yoou just had to keep an eye on, knew that there was something preventing them from going somewhere else, and this brought out anger in the best of them. This meant that if something–a new kid, a bad night of sleep, whatever–set them off we were in for a heap of shit.

And, of course, when we didn’t have long-termers who were mandatory one-to-one supervision, and the unit was slow, I would always get moved to another unit where someone was having problems. In some cases this meant poop.

My own pro method more or less went out the window. Sometimes we’d get kids we’d seen a million times before, who’d always run away and usually try to do a bunch of shit on their way out the door. I got really good at stopping them on the way in and saying, “alright, you don’t want to be here? Cool. I’ll walk you out the door right now, but you aren’t going to fuck with anyone else. We’ll just get your shit and go and I’ll even wait ten minutes before I call the cops.” It made life easier.

To make everything worse, our team started to fall apart. Carl left for law school. A couple others started working hours in the actual intake office, where they processed the kids in and out and made the calls to find them places. An overnight position opened up and I applied for it, figuring that I could work on a book or something and see Aly during the day and deal with significantly less shit. Sometimes overnight shifts were pains in the ass but a fair amount of time dudes just played video games all night.

I was worried that I might get passed on for the job because I had spent several well documented months establishing a series of complaints when my supervisor and HR had “lost” paperwork for a standard month raise. It had taken another six months to get it and even then, they refused to pay me back pay. I barraged them with paper. My math was impeccable. I said things like, “I’m sure we could all agree that the solution I’ve proposed is more than reasonable and it should be easy to settle it, and if not I’m more than happy to start charging interest on the amount I’m due and pursue a greivance with my union.” They paid.

But the straw that broke the back was when one of our new team members, after a meeting where we were discussing the case of our latest teen mother, went and repeated all of our observations back to the girl, as if we’d all been talking shit except for her. A full two weeks of work building a relationship with this girl shot to hell. I was furious. Nobody did anything about it. And they weren’t even bothering to hire anyone for the overnight position.

One night the supervisor said, “you want to do a hospital transport?” It was late and I knew that a transport meant a single kid, off site, and possible overtime, so I said, “sure.” The nurse on duty prepped some information for the hospital while I hung out with the kid, a quiet, nice guy from some Central American country who was ok and English and better at growing a weak moustache. This was going to be OK.

We parked downtown and walked into HCMC. I handed the paperwork over to the woman at the check-in counter, and she entered a world of quiet panic. The next thing I knew, I was closed in a exam room with a sealed glass door wearing a mask because the kid was a possible carrier of Tuberculosis. Except no one had bothered to tell me back at work.

I spent hours there with the kid while he got checked out and then admitted. Once he was settled I went back to work. My shift had officially ended at 11:00 PM. It was 11:45. I walked in to find that my partner had left some nightly reports for me to do instead of finishing them. I did them, then pointed at the clock in front of the overnight supervisor–”that’s OT I got”–and got in my Jeep to drive home.

I pulled out on 46th and started heading for the highway. I was tired and fried and pissed off. The guy in front of me seemed to not know where he was going, because he kept breaking and then speeding up again. 46th in that neck of the woods turns into four lanes after Chicago Ave, but isn’t clearly marked for a block. Right where the markings started, I shifted into the right lane and started to pull around the guy.

WHAM. Everything shook and moved faster than I could take it in–suddenly the Jeep, me strapped in, was flying across someone’s yard, barrelling towards a street sign and a fire hydrant and some cars, and then it happened:

My life flashed before my eyes. And it was a miserable one.

I spun the wheel and slammed on the brakes and came to rest in the middle of the street without hitting anything else. Some people were already charing out of their doors. I jumped out to find oil pouring out of the bottom of the jeep, the front drivers side bumper mangled. The guy I was passing had decided to make a right-hand turn out of the left hand lane and rammed me right in the front side of my jeep.

We called the cops. We sat. He acted nervous–it was his brother’s car, he had a date, would I mind if he left? At one point I went digging around in the jeep for a lighter and a cop drove by but didn’t see anything–because the guy who hit me, a couple drinks in him, waved him on.

His date showed up. He announced that he was leaving. I had all his info, so I said, “whatever” and called the cops again. Then the tow truck.

All told I sat out there for an hour and a half, smoking and my eyes welling up and wondering why everything was turning to crap, wondering why everything racing through my head as I thought I was going to die, flying through that guy’s yard, could be summed up with the question, “Really? This is all I get?”

The next day I worked I walked in to the office of my supervisor’s boss and said, “Are you hiring for that overnight slot or not?”

“Well, it’s going to be a little bit yet,” he said.

I handed him my letter. “Here you go. It’s my two weeks’ notice. I’ll be in San Diego for the second half of it. I quit.”

Aly has always wanted kids. Mall of America, 1996: For some stupid reason, a movie or something, we were there and I joked that we should ride the roller coaster. We’d been dating about six seconds and every goofy impulse was still good for a laugh. As we were buying our tickets for the roller coaster–which was dull and not at all enjoyable for the big or the tall–right in the middle of conversation Aly said, “Yeah, I think I’d like to have two kids and get it out of the way early, you know, be done with it by the time I’m 26 or 27.”

Whoa. Stop right there, missy. Don’t get me wrong–my folks and my grandma did OK by me but when I think parenting I think about my sister and her kids and I have been sure for years that I definitely was not going to be having kids. I mean, maybe when I was like old and shit, like 30 or something.

I didn’t tell Aly any of this.

For the next several years, it was never a good time to have kids. She first brought it up in Boston. We had a couple friends with a kid and I saw how much they loved him and how tough it is for them and Aly said, “if you think about it, it’s never a good time,” which to her means “so go ahead and do it,” and I’m just saying “Exactly, so later.”

So I kept putting it off. It remained not a good time because Aly started school and I started teaching and there is nothing that kills a procreative boner faster than teaching high school freshmen. It remained not a good time because every time I opened my student loan bill for my wasted year in grad school I think about how I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing and how I don’t even know who I am anymore. I keep thinking of how fucked up it would be to make a kid grow up and have learn life at the foot of a completely miserable human being. Plus nothing leads to sexy time more than clinical depression.

It remained not a good time in Pensacola, even though we both turned 28 while we were there. It continued to be a bad time for kids when we moved back to Saint Paul. It was getting harder and harder to imagine kids after going to work at the fucked-up kid factory every day for six months “All I see is how fucked up kids can be, how awful their lives are, and I don’t think I can do that.”

Aly said, “Think about this–how hard did those parents have to work to fuck those kids up? We won’t be like that.”

I think about me and I think about the night I moved my sister out of her house over Christmas and all the screaming and I say, “How do you know?”

There’s too many screwed up people in this world, I thought to myself, but I was really the only screwed up person I was thinking about. I was having trouble remembering a time when I had a goal or any sort of idea of what I wanted to be doing with myself. It was almost five years since I’d decided to quit grad school and I really hadn’t figured out what I was supposed to be doing. Teaching didn’t seem to be it, and the Fucked-Up Kid factory didn’t seem to be it, but every month that went by it seemed like it was harder and harder to imagine what exactly I gave a shit about except trying to pay bills. I couldn’t imagine adding a kid to that, but I knew we’d have to do it one day and just because I was miserable didn’t mean that I should make Aly be as well.

So we started trying. We tried again. We tried some more, and we kept trying, and then we didn’t try for a while. This was starting to get stressful. Then we tried again, and again, and then there’s charts and temperature taking and books and shouting matches. I quit my job. Aly’s business wasn’t going very well, and it seemed like nothing was going right for us, and I started to feel like there was something horribly wrong with me, like all this doubt and avoidance was why we weren’t getting pregnant, and I was almost relieved when Aly moved to Wisconsin for a couple months to do some rural midwifing so we could take a breather from the whole baby thing.

Finally, though, after she returned, we’d had enough, and we went to the doctor.

Our doc is this incredibly bright, incredibly funny guy who happens to be from Southeast Asia. I mention that because he’s got one hell of an accent and likes to call me “Big Guy.” “Alright, what’s going on with you Big Guy?” “Get on the table, Big Guy.” “Take a deep breath, Big Guy.”

So I managed to explain to Doc what was going on. This was a painful, uncomfortable process, as if saying out loud was the equivalent of castration. “Ah, ok,” he said. “So you want a test of your sperm?”

Ugh. This was uncomfortable and nervewracking. “Yes.”

“Easy, we will do the test. Hold on,” and then he walked out the door only to return five minutes later with a sealed plastic sterile cup. “Ok, Big Guy, this is what you will do. You need to give us a sample. You need to abstain for three days, and then I want you to ejackerate into this cup.”

I started laughing, then clapped my hand over my mouth.

“So you got it, right, no ejackeration for three days”–me snorting–”then ejackerate into the cup and bring it back to us.” I kept giggling.

I am certain that the little giggle-fits weren’t nearly as obvious as they felt, but even so, when he paused, I felt the need to explain that I wasn’t an appalling racist. “I’m sorry,” I said, rubbing my eyes, “this is just really stressful and I don’t react very well and, well, I’m sorry.”

He didn’t seem to care. “It’s okay, Big Guy. Oh, I recommend that you wait for the morning to ejackerate.”

It took all I could do to not pee my pants.

So I went home and I committed myself to three whole days spunk-free. On the morning of the fourth day, I cracked the top of the container and then realized I had no idea how this was supposed to work. “How do you think?” I mused.

“Don’t ask me,” said Aly, “I don’t have a clue.”

So with a little work that was more awkward than anything else I managed, after trying several positions, to find a way to jerk off into the cup, sealed it, and had Aly take it to the lab for testing. A few nervous days later, the phone rang. It wss my clinic.

“Hello,” the friendly woman on the other end said. “I have your test results, and you’ve come back less than optimal so you can go ahead and proceed with whatever alternative fertilization methods you’re planning.”

“Wait, WHAT?” I said. “What do you mean alternative fertilization?”

Awkward pause. “You, uh, you weren’t getting tested as part of an alternative fertilization plan?”

“NO!” I shouted into the phone. “We have no plan, we were just trying to see what was going on. Can you put my Doc on the phone?”

“Um, well, he’s seeing patients right now, but I’ll have him call you. Sorry about the mix-up. Bye!”

I spent the next 90 minutes or so banging my head against the nearest hard surface until the phone rang again. I demanded explanation, since the previous call made it seem like I was a candidate for some petri-dish medical shit.

“No, Big Guy, you shouldn’t worry at all,” said Doc. “No, you are just a little bit, tiny bit slow, and a tiny bit low. No big deal at all.”

“But the woman said…”

“No big deal at all, you’re fine. You just need good timing, that’s all.”

We’d never had any of that.

Later that day I opted to only tell Aly that we needed good timing and nothing about the first conversation. After some conversation we decided that we’d take the summer off, get rid of the pressure. Come October, after another heart-to-heart, I finally broke down and agreed to quit smoking. In addition, advised by Aly’s colleague Amy, we also decided to do an extended, 28 day detox to clear our systems out.

“No wheat, dairy, red meat, soy, nuts, nightshade grown vegetables, oranges, potatoes, refined sugars, processed food, nothing potentially allergenic,” Amy said.

“So Budweiser is ok, because it’s made from rice, right?” I asked.

“No beer,” said Amy.

Quitting smoking: I wanted to commit murder. If I’d thought I knew depression before, I was dead wrong. At one point I ended up in a ball on my kitchen floor sobbing and yelling “why won’t my brain work???” while Aly stood there, trying desperately to figure out some way to help. I chomped on gum. It tasted horrible. After a couple weeks, I gave up the gun because it tasted like shit. I sort of felt like I was getting a handle on things, and it was time to start our detox.

Every day for 28 days I ate chicken and greens and turkey and brown rice and quinoa, but it wasn’t just food. We started the day with a smoothie with a bunch of powder in it and then followed that up with some supplements and some weird clay that made me poop solid bricks, frequently. We ended the day with a sauna at the gym and me dreaming of chocolate cake. I complained about all of this on public message boards and didn’t say why I was doing it. It wasn’t even my worry–I just didn’t want to embarrass Aly.

Our bodies started doing weird things. We both started breaking out a lot, like crap was flushing out the pores of our skin. I went through a couple days of being really hyper, like every stimulant I’d ever had was coming back for one last visit. We were both cranky as shit. Still, it was entertaining to watch my body surprise me.

About 21 days in I really got the hang of the detox and said, “I could do this another 28 days, but I’m glad we’re almost done so I can have a beer.” It was at this point that Aly informed me that we’d be spending another three weeks slowly adding foods back in to see how we reacted. I was less than pleased. Still, I stuck it out, and the only really noticable reaction I had was, after drinking a glass of milk, my nose started running and I suddenly had horrible BO at the gym, something that hadn’t been a problem since we’d started.

So I quit milk, and life returned to normal, and I had to admit I felt 1000x better. I kept the drinking to a minimum. Even though I still had to go to my shitty job every day detoxing and working out almost made me feel like Minnesota winters weren’t a yearly sign of the apocalpyse.

And after a big chunk of time, in January, we started doing it again. “No pressure, ok? If it doesn’t take, it’s not a big deal. It probably won’t work right the first time.”

Aly said, “Ok, just keep reminding me, though.”

So one night after a party we did it, and then we did it a few more times. Still, a couple weeks later, Aly came back from the bathroom with a sad look on her face and a tear in her eye and said, “I think I have my period.”

“It’s ok,” I said. “Remember, no pressure?”

But reminding her was harder than it looked.

A while later she called me at work. “Are you sitting down?”

“What’s up?” I asked, worried.

“Well,” she said, “I guess I didn’t have my period, because we’re pregnant.”

And at that moment, one I’d been worried about for years not because I dreaded it but because I honestly didn’t know how I’d react, I just sat there, stunned, wanting to jump for joy and knowing that I couldn’t because there was no way I was sharing this moment with my asshole boss. Then I did it anyway.

Originally written 3/3/09. Server out of commission last night.

My dad watches sports. Relentlessly. It’s an entire world behind his glasses that I don’t understand. He doesn’t shout or yell. He consumes.

When I was a kid it never seemed like he was trying to get me into sports–god knows, I hated tennis and golf and baseball for cutting into my cartoons–but occasionally he would drag us to go see a high school football game. I learned nothing in these excursions, mostly because I would rather be running around pretending I was somewhere else. This is probably why I was such a lousy football player once I decided to be an “athlete.”

One night in particular Dad took Colleen and I to the big cross-town rivalry game, the County school hosting our independent school, which almost always won the game. I was in elementary school and unenthusiastic about the outing, but Dad insisted, so we went. I even sat still for a while to watch the game, but I found it hard to follow–players stood, players moved, everyone yelled, I looked around for the guy with the ball, and inevitably someone would get tackled while I was looking somewhere else, so I begged to be allowed to wander around and my Dad consented.

I had always been in love with the back of things. The graffiti on the back of buildings when you go by them on the train, alleyways between two hundred year old buildings, the spot in the hide-a-bed when it’s unfolded where you can crawl and hide for hours as long as no one tries to turn it back into a couch, anything that exists without being noticed, the other side of a surface covered with hordes of people and cars and noise and lights. So with little cuidance from my Dad I soon found myself underneath the bleachers, looking out over the steep embankment that led down to the field where my rec league soccer team practiced. Pretending some game or another, occasionally interrupted by the shouts of fans and the excited stomping of feet right overhead, all those people three feet away and totally seperate, me all alone.

Well, not quite.

As I spacily wandered under the bleachers I realized that I wasn’t alone at all. There was a small crew of redneck dudes there as well, and I am fairly certain that they had specific motivations for getting away from the crowd. Still, I didn’t worry, until they noticed me.

“Hey, what the fuck you doin; here, little kid?”

This was not going to go well.

They cornered me, laughing, three or four or five of them catching me in a circle, pushing me back and forth, calling me “fatty” and “little kid” over and over again, and I hated them for it, because I wasn’t a little kid and I just wanted to be left alone and I said so.

“Ok, we’ll leave you alone, dipshit,” one of the guys said, and as everyone else laughed he grabbed me and threw me down the embankment. I bounced off a few rocks and felt my ankle twist and finally stopped two-thirds of the way down in a pile of tall grass and broken bottles, cigarette butts and pull-tabs from beer cans.

I was sobbing. I tried to climb up the hill but my ankle ached and I wasn’t strong and the bank was steep and above me the boys stood, laughing, as I cried and yelled, trying to spit out “Help!” but really just making this sort of sick, deeated sound.

All I heard was cheers from the crowd and the pounding of feet. Cowbells. Dad and Colleen weren’t going to be able to find me, because I was behind the world, not in it. Just me and the long shadows cast over me by laughing, jeering assholes waiting to shove me back down.

Eventually I got back up the hill, bleeding in a bunch of places, and hobbled back to find Dad, who was getting worried. I think he went looking for the redneck dudes, but they were nowhere to be found. He was furious, but neither of us could do a thing.

“Let’s go home,” he announced, and I was glad to be gone.