It was a summer afternoon at the Record Ranch and I had nothing better to do than hang out there because, well, I was a motivated, organized 13-year-old who tried to make sure that hanging out at the record store and playing video games with Dudley received equal time.

Roy was behind the counter gabbing about something or other–this was at the height of his reggae/rasta fandom in which he discussed Jah as if it were an old friend, and I said, “I’m running to Foodtown for some milk–anyone want anything?”

Foodtown was the only grocery store in the downtown area, which wasn’t saying much. Roy: “yeah, hey, bring me back a half gallon of milk.” So I went on a milk run, and when I got back Roy was still gabbing about Jah and Bob and Ziggy and HR and I wolfed down a candy bar and said something like “I bet I could drink this entire half gallon in one shot,” and Roy and whoever else was there said bullshit and suddenly, Roy and I were in a race. Since he had a gallon and I had a half-gallon we drew a mutually-agreed upon line in sharpie on his jug to mark how far he needed to get and 1,2,3 suddenly I was chugging milk like a bastard.

I tossed back my half-gallon, not in one chug, but quickly, with only occasional breaks, during which I watched Roy work on the gallon. When I finished the half-gallon he hadn’t made it anywhere near the line. As I took my victory lap around the store Roy angrily said “it wasn’t fair, it’s a whole different thing to have to drink out of the gallon container” and then suddenly got very quiet and walked into the back room. Five minutes later, he re-emerged, face a little redder than usual, and announced, “well, I just threw all that up.”

I, on the other hand, just biked home.

I am standing at the kitchen counter of a vacant, mostly deserted apartment in Park Slope writing this because there is no chair, so I am rocking back and forth on my feet and occasionally accidentally hitting the “back” key which means I’ve had to restart once. I am strongly considering moving to the floor and will say so if I do.

The floor: a semester into college this hippie guy named Matt was moving out of the dorm because he had blown school and he gave me his loft, which was hand-built and looked really cool in his room. I assembled it and rearranged my side of the room, which was a shithole and a stinky one at that since I never washed my socks. Once I began climbing into the loft on a nightly basis, however, I discovered that it was shaky and sort of scary, especially to a big dude who didn’t like heights that much.

This situation was made worse just a couple weeks later by the introduction of a real life, occasionally sleepin’ over girlfriend, which made it completely impossible to sleep in the loft, so I pulled the mattress down to the floor and the loft itself became a place where I threw my stinky socks and forgot about them.

First College Girlfriend and I ended a few months later in the sort of terrifying mess that is like a standardized checklist of “how to fuck up a relationship” on both our parts, but the event I’m about to detail was not one of them. I only mention the terrible breakup because, for both of us, it was the sort of thing that blew up so badly and lasted so long that by the time you’re done with the breakup, you have managed to foerget many of the details of the actual relationship, the good, the bad, and the embarrassing, which is a shame, because I wish I could remember all the gory details of one night when my girlfriend got quite drunk, and threw up on me. A bit.

It wasn’t a big deal, and it wasn’t like I hadn’t puked on myself, other people, large moving vehicles, hell, everything short of livestock, and would continue to do so well into my late 20’s. But it occurred as we were going to sleep right there on the mattressand there was some clean-up and sneaking into the men’s bathroom to get her showered and when it was all said and done we went right back to that old mattress on the floor and slept. Silver lining: first time my side of the room had been cleaned in a while.

I really don’t remember where my roommate was during these sleepovers but I know he didn’t appreciate them, which is why he made a point of sabotaging my first possible hook-up at college. On many levels I wasn’t winning a lot of popularity contests with him or his friends, so I’m fairly certain I didn’t give a shit one way or the other. Ah, polite society.

But just a few days after the little incident, on a Sunday evening, he did actually storm into the room after we’d gone to bed. Apparently, he and some other folks had decided to make a run to Hudson and he had drank a large quantity of vodka on the drive back, but I didn’t know anything of this when he crashed through the door, grunting, and then crawled directly into bed. I did have a guess or two just a few minutes later when he sat up, made a retching noise, and then threw up on the tile floor right by where our heads were. And on us. Just a bit.

“What the fuck?” I said as he then rushed to the door, but his hand was slippery from the first heave and he couldn’t get a grip on the door, so he just threw up on the floor by the door instead. Stepping in the puke, I managed to get the door open and rush him into the very same men’s room where my girlfriend had been just a few nights before, where he finished puking in the shower, and then went back and cleaned up his puke with my girlfriend.

Ever vigilant against choking on vomit, I put Zack to bed on his side and gave him a bucket. The room was cleaned up, and exhausted, my girlfriend and I went to bed. I think I got a thank you the next day, but a conditional one.

A lot of these stories involve some sort of horrifying mismanagement of my relationships with my friends, roommates, lovers, but that first year of college I don’t think I could have crashed and burned worse than I did with my girlfriend and my roommate. I can’t help but think, though, that in both cases getting puked on was a harbinger of things to come.

Still on my feet.

Crusty Craig called and conjectured that we should play one of his shows, his trademark gravel voice–”these great DIY bands from Arkansas, BG and Buck Buck, they’re totally DIY and you guys are totally DIY” which meant that we simply sounded nothing like them, which was par for the course.

“Craig, we’ll do it.”

“Great these guys are so good you will love them they’re super-DIY,” said Craig, all one sentence, sort of like I think. Craig ran a label/distro for records that struck his fancy, 99% of which seemed to be crust from other countries sung in a different language than their country of origin, as in “this crucial band from Turkey sings all their songs in Armenian and totally destroy.” He also distroed our record–”High Steppin’ Nickel Kids: political DIY pop punk from Boston”–because he was, and remains a fucking sweetheart.

The show was in the basement of a house somewhere on the back of Mission Hill which has resisted gentrification over many years by remaining gross and fucked up, and this seemed to be no exception. There were some scummy-looking punk kids digging a piece of carpet out of the garbage when we arrived, and we hauled our shit in, and loudly greeted the touring bands, who seemed pretty cool.

What we didn’t know was that there was another band on the bill, but we were about to discover the majesty that was Vomit Dichotomy, hailing from Vermont, who (as Craig explained to us later) hopped on the bill last minute. I should have guessed when I saw punk kids I didn’t recognize digging through trash, but it turns out the large section of carpet they discovered was intended to assist in their performance, which was essentially badly done grind/noise accompanied by the following:

1) Singer drinks motor oil.
2) Singer pukes.
3) singer smashes bottle of Mad Dog, rolls in glass.
4) singer attempts to pierce his cheek with a saftey pin.
5) singer drinks Mad Dog/motor oil mix, pukes again.
6) lots of bad music.
7) Inaudible female trumpet player shoves the trumpet into her vagina, fails to create sound.
Etc.

Thankfully, they’d laid out the carpet (which they hauled out and threw in the neighbor’s trash) but by this point they–and the posse of kids who had come from Vermont to see them play what I’m guessing was the same show they did in their homestown—were pretty fucked up. Most other folks had cleared out and Craig, exhausted from begging people to stay and apologizing to the people who lived in the house, just kept mumbling “so fucking disrespectful, what the fuck?” over and over again.

By the time we were ready to play–I can’t remember the order but both BG and Buck Buck were pretty fucking awesome–the Vermont kids were fucked out of their gourd. We played out first song and it was clear that it was going to be exceptionally hot and that our neighbors to the north were going to act like idiots, so with our second song Joe announced “this song is called ‘Vermont Sucks’.” The third song, if memory serves, was called “Vermont can eat my cock,” and so on, and so forth, until two of the Vermont kids ended up punching each other, which inspired my already mostly-naked, sweaty self (it was hot!) to ram into them while playing out song until they hit the floor and then I sat on them for the next two songs, which I can’t imagine was particularily comfortable. It seemed like a bold manuever but really, I spent the entire time worrying that I was going to get Hepatitis from some broken, blood-covered glass still wedged in the one kid’s skin. It’s tough to admit you’re a pussy in the middle of a fucking punk show, especially if you’re playing, so I just stayed there until it was time to sing a song and then went for the much safer option of kicking them until they got the hint.

First: Matt says, “Hey, can you give me a ride over to Liz’s house?”

Which was weird, of course, because I didn’t really know Matt all that well, but he seemed like an OK enough guy for a high school hippie–birkenstocks, floppy skater haircut, better taste in music than the kids I went to school with. He was an out-of-town church camp friend of some folks like Amber and Hope and pretty, or cute, or pretty cute. A good guy from the big ol’ city of Lexington, totally into this girl Liz who served, because our town was small and boring, as Nemesis. I understood none of this politic because it appeared to be determined entirely before the Dork Outreach program was established, but I did get the sense that either by nature or just tired acceptance of the role everyone had assigned her, Liz was sort of rude and a pain in the ass. We should have gotten along much better than we did, but organizing wasn’t my strong point.

So I ended up at this gathering of people who I wasn’t quite sure I was really friends with and this kid Matt is there and I’m wondering where the hell Drew is, since they’re really his friends, and Matt is wondering why Liz, who he’s dating, isn’t answering her phone.

“Hey, can you give me a ride to Liz’s house?”

So we got in my car and we drove across town to Liz’s house which was right down the street from my grandmother’s house and we parked and Matt grabbed a rock to throw at her window and that’s when we saw the fully-lit room and the silhouetted embrace and I’d just given Matt a ride across town so he could watch Drew make out with his girlfriend, and fuck if I had a clue what to say, so I didn’t say anything of consequence at all.

Just me and this kid with floppy skater hair staring at a window.

“I guess, take me back to the party,” Matt says.

Last: “Can we go for a ride?” Drew says.

So we went for a ride. A few months before, my social career slid off the ledge whimpering and dripping like melted peanut butter with no fanfare, no bang, nothing. So now getting things working again, at least with those who were important, that meant something. So Drew and I went for a ride. Straight to Liz’s house.

It had been months since Matt and I had done the same thing. I parked in the same spot, across the street from the same window. And just like before with Matt, Drew and I looked up. I wanted to make a crack about how this seemed familiar but I didn’t. I waited. The same light was on, and it only took a couple minutes for everything to repeat: the silhouette, the guy in there, some guy replacing Drew the way Drew had replaced Matt, except this time I called the kid getting fucked over a friend and I didn’t give a shit about the new guy at all. This made it all different: I could say “fuck her” and didn’t have to search for anything more profound than that.

But part of me clung to the eerie synchronicity as I watched Drew’s shoulders dropp, just a bit, and part of my wanted to thank Liz for making sure the knife was twisted until it stuck, because now her window wasn’t my problem anymore. I was getting tired of it.

“Well, I guess that’s it,” Drew says.

I kept showering. Even though nothing was going to come of it, I kept showering and I stayed confused because I wasn’t half as smart as I thought I was.

Realistically, however, even if I understood completely why Aly wasn’t talking to me, even if I could step out of my own self-centered ass to figure out that what we had going on was pretty confusing for her, it still wouldn’t have helped. I mean, it just doesn’t make any sense to not be talking when you like a girl so much and she likes you so much that her own fucking boyfriend looks at you across the roof of your car during a cigarette run in the Midway Rainbow parking lot and says, “I mean, I know you guys are going to get together once I move, so just take good care of her.”

Of course, that was a few months in the past.

A few more days, a few more showers just for pride went by, and we talked. Little fanfare. Just a quick reaching out, breaking the silence. It was almost her birthday and maybe it was the inevitability that we’d have to be in the same room that inspired it but at any rate, I appreciated it. We’d get our shit sorted out. For now, knowing that I didn’t completely fuck everything up made it all right. OK, not all right. But workable.

Aly and I discussed birthday celebrations–hers falling on a Sunday. We had some friends playing in the Entry and Sunday Night Dance Party in the mainroom. I would be there and Mark would be there. With any luck I would contain myself, which I fully failed to do at her 20th.

Her 20th was in the house with the goofy hippies and the party was a party full of 20-year-olds. There were surprisingly few people in the kitchen which i usually assume to be the gathering spot, but plenty in the living room and one bedroom dedicated, as always, to listening to Ram Das while meditating/having a hippie acid freakout/making me fucking barf my pants. And, of course, the dreaded boyfriend was up visiting from Madison, his home town when he wasn’t at the same school as us.

Jon-Jon and I arrived with a bottle of Maker’s Mark for the birthday girl and, having been on my best behavior for six whole weeks to impress her, and seeing the boyfriend, I launched into the Rules of drinking Bourbon, which was some line of horseshit about never mixing Maker’s because if you were going to do that you might as well be drinking a shitty whisky like Beam. I did not then, nor do I now, drink Canadian or Tennessee whiskeys, so I didn’t even put that on the table. Instead, I cracked the bottle and encouraged her to take a sip, which she did.

Jon-Jon and I then proceeded to drink the entire bottle ourselves, possibly because we were morons. But via Jon-Jon (and me just a bit) we managed to share copious amounts of both the Maker’s and a bottle of Jager that seemed to appear from nowhere with Aly’s boyfriend Josh. Enough that we effectively banished him the the backyard.

So when I wandered into that familiar yard (with the gravel parking spaces where I’d parked all summer the year before) late in the evening because I was wondering where Aly was, I found her half-sitting, half-squatting in the patchy grass as Josh laid on his side and puked.

“You ok?” I asked.

“He’s really sick,” she said.

“You should keep him from lying on his back if he’s still puking,” I said. I thought back a few years to a boat in the waters between France and Ireland. “Also, I would get him say five, six pieces of white bread and make him eat it.”

“I have wheat, would wheat help?”

“Well, shitty white bread is better, that shit’s like a sponge, but anything to soak up some of the shit in his stomach.”

So she did. I was struck by the amount of care she gave to her boyfriend, especially since they weren’t exactly getting along all that well–the main reason, it seemed, that he got so drunk. What a lame birthday. You turn twenty, some dummy buys you a gift and then drinks it all, your boyfriend that you don’t really like so much but you still care for gets wasted and pukes everywhere, and you end up cleaning up the mess while he sleeps.

So 21 had to be better, but I still didn’t exactly feel right about the whole situation.

Mark has been the guy who replaced Josh when I was too polite and cautious to announce that I wanted to replace Josh, much to my frustration, and as I’ve said elsewhere, I actually quite liked Mark, which made the whole issue of Aly and I sleeping together even more outrageously conflicted and annoying than it already was. This did not bode well for the big rock-show 21st birthday.

The entire evening was outstandingly tense. I believe there was cake. I drank. I gave Aly a hug but stayed away and avoided Mark altogether. Somewhere along the line I got aggressively hit on by a regular at the bar who I was more scared of than anything else and sort of ended up spilling the short version of the whole deal on my co-worker Jeri Kay who politely and sweetly told me I should stop being a dumbass (not in those words). so I sucked it up, scored a stack of drink tickets from somebody, bought Aly a drink, and then walked up to Mark.

“Buy you a drink?” I asked.

“Gin & tonic,” he said.

“You and I should have a talk, I guess,” I said.

“Yeah, we should.”

So we went upstairs where it was quieter, SNDP in full swing, nobody in the upstairs bar, and we sat and I said something like, but in much longer form:

“Look, I’m really sorry, but this is a really confusing situation, and you know I don’t mean any disrespect. It wasn’t right to you and it just sort of happened and I don’t want you to be mad at Aly and I think she has a lot going on with you leaving and I have no idea what’s up with us and this whole thing has been shitty.”

And Mark looked at me, and said, “Well, I guess I knew it was going to happen, I just wish it would have happened, you know, after I left.”

And understand it took a while and it took a few drinks to get us to this point, but once we got there, then it took several more drinks to celebrate the fact that we’d worked it out in the first place, which meant that by the time everything was said and done they were hitting the lights, he stack of drink tickets were gone, and Mark, Aly’s boyfriend, and me, the guy Aly had cheated with, were drunk like two loyal sailors. I mean, loyal to the bottle. We might as well have been singing fucking sea chanties, arms around each other, stumbling down the stairs back to the Entry where things were winding down, the regular was still hovering somewhere (much to my fright), and Aly was ready to go home. So I bade people good night and, for the second birthday in a row, left her with an outstandingly drunk boyfriend. So drunk that any hope of a properly romantic conclusion to her 21st (that having been cancelled on her 20th due to puking and Wonder Bread) was tossed out the window and what she got was passing out and snoring.

I do not recommend such repeat sabotage of a possible lover’s sex life as a way of wooing–I can’t imagine it would work twice. But when the phone rang the next day so she could yell at me for getting Mark so drunk, I could hear the laugh in her voice and I knew that we were really speaking again. So I made sure I showered.

6:00 AM I got up on three hours of sleep for a 7:00 AM Sunday morning stage call at the Ave, all of us dragging ass and mustering absolutely zero enthusiasm for spending the day working crew for Marilyn Manson.

You can always tell the sort of people a band can be by the sort of people they hire to do their work. In this case, MM, for all the goth posturing, were paying Florida roots back by bringing an either cadre of shitkicker swamp-ass rednecks, Larry the Cable Guy looking fuckheads who were deep South metal pros.

Boy was I excited.

Cookiepants (who, you may remember, was one of the numerous black Gregs I worked with) and I finished pushing the gearbox we’d been dealt from one of their semis to the middle of the dance floor. It was hot that day, even at that hour, and the overnight air in the Ave can get a little stale until the A/C is working, when it did work. (I can’t imagine they don’t still struggle with it.) THere was a ton of gear and I was working up a reasonable stink and even Cookiepants was sweating, so we paused in the middle of the dance floor. It was this moment that one of the band crew, seemingly out of no where, walked up to Greg and handed him a short (9 inches or so) piece of two-by-for painted black.

“Here you go, take care of that for me,” the guy said, and walked off.

Greg looked at the block for a minute, then turned it over, where, in white soundboard masking tape, someone had written “NIGGER BLOCK.”

Now, there’s a lot of options for a reaction at this moment. Greg could have gotten pissed, and rightfully so–it wasn’t like he was the only black guy working crew that day but he was the least tough looking, beyond the sheer offensiveness of the act. He could have gone to our boss. Hell, I was thinking a bout coming out swingin. But Greg was the kind of kid who called himself Toby (”It’s Kunta, DAMMIT!”) and the kid of kid who did an amazing Urkel impression and basically the kid of dude who probably had been getting shit all his life because he grew up in Iowa.

So instead, Greg turned to me, held the block up, and said, at the top of his lungs, “LOOK MASSUH TIGGA DE GUY BROUGHT ME A BIG OL’ NIGGUH BLOCK!”

I didn’t even have time to process this when he continued:

“WHATEVA WILL AHS DO WITH DE NIGGUH BLOCK? TIGGUH CATCH THE NIGGUH BLOCK!”

And he tossed it too me. I tossed it back and he laughed, the whole time chanting “nigguh block” over and over again, cackling hysterically.

“After I put away dis nigguh block maybe de white man, he want me to bus’ up a chiffarobe!”

And our co-workers didn’t get it and the cracker pieces of shit who thought it was a funny joke just sort of stared on and then the moment was over, no fanfare, just Greg tossing the block into a road case and us slogging through the rest of a long, shitty fucking day until we got rid of the useless milky-eyed douchebag and his posse of inbreds, rolling the last road case on the truck at 12:45 am and sprinting to find the emptiest bar where we could use all six of our well-earned drink tickets before last call. I found Cookiepants, not much the drinker, in the entry where he was collecting more beers than I’ve ever seen him drink before or since, and as I grabbed three Jamesons and three Budweisers, trying to forget the day, he just smiled and said “nigger block” and then downed his beer.

I conclude Aly’s week of story requests with a short one, that, like the story of Sprout, is about a little thing that ends up much bigger than you’d expect.

It came out of nowhere one day. No one was exactly sure where it was at any given time. I would guess that it had a single spot where it stayed, but there was no way of predicting. It would just appear and wreak havoc.

It was the Crow.

For months it terrorized the neighborhood north of Macalester, south of Selby, and immediately west of Snelling, this enormous, black, dirty-looking crow that perched on rooftops and waited for an unsuspecting pedestrian to come along, at which point it would Snap into action, swooping down at top speed and crashing directly into the person’s head, then flying away.

I knew multiple people who were attacked by the crow, but Aly’s roommate Michael seemed to get it constantly. We theorized that it was either his shiny bald head glowing in the sun or the crutches he was on for a while, as if the fucking bird smelled weakness. Even after tagging it once with his crutches, the bird still came after him, for no apparent reason whatsoever.

That was the worst part–the bird wasn’t looking for food, didn’t stick around long enough to grab anything, just dove full speed and buzzed your head, scaring the living shit out of you and flying off. It became big enough news that it actually got a segment on one of those bullshit newsitainment shows like Inside Edition or A Current Affair before those shows completely 100% specialized in Lindsey Lohan fingerbangs. Michael was even interviewed, and Aly and I watched the episode excitedly until we realized that Michael’s part was going to be reduced to one two-second soundbite.

The day after I moved into Aly’s, which happened to be the same night that Drew’s ginormous ska band played the Turf Club, half of them going back to my now empty apartment to sleep, the other half getting monumentally shit-canned and looking through Michael’s deserted porn collection and passing out on the floor wrapped around boxes of my shit, we were sitting on the front porch and I spied the crow, perching halfway down Ashland towards Snelling, and I started to tell the story. It was clear from the blank looks that these guys didn’t believe me at all, so I told them to hang out and watch. It was about this time that a teenage kid wearing fat pants came walking down Ashland. “Ok, guys, watch this.”

So we all sat on the stoop or in the yard, trying (and failing) to look discrete as the kid passed. “Don’t look away,” I said, and we all stared as the kid got less than halfway down the block before the crow dove and rammed itself right into his head.

“Holy shit!” one of the guys yelled and the poor kid, who had already crapped those JNCOs getting divebombed by the world’s meanest crow, had to turn and look as an entire crew of tired, hungover dorks laughed hysterically at him.

Originally published July 11th

Right after I met Aly in 1995 she spent a summer living on Grand Avenue in the upstairs of this shitty, fucked up house that I knew was shitty and fucked up because I lived in the downstairs of the same shitty fucked up house the year before. She was living with this hippie Jessica who is one of about a thousand Jessicas I’ve met in my life and not the same Jessica as the one I’ve mentioned elsewhere, in case that gets anywhere as confusing as the fact that I know 1,300 guys named Dave or David and few go by David and none go by Davey. But she was a hippie, and her friend from back in Bethesda Nick was also living with them, and they were both sort of goofy, which is a rude and indelicate thing to say, but they were friggin’ goofy, I mean, aren’t all 20 year old hippies fucking goofy? A similar generalization could, and should, be made about all 20 year old punks and being fucking assholes. Needless to say, immediately there were some communication issues which aren’t really mine to discuss but were embodied into a physical symbol with the existence of Sprout.

Sprout was a four foot tall styrofoam model of the Jolly Green Giant’s sidekick, and for some reason, Jessica and Nick thought this would be a hilarious thing to haul home from Pride that year. He immediate ended up guarding the landing at the top of the stairs into the apartment, this obnoxious, bulky piece of crap smiling with his arms outstretched. And whenever you walked in–I believe Ashley actually started this tradition–because you fucking hated Sprout and all that Sprout stood for, like being ugly, and taking up space, and goofy hippies, you had to punch Sprout. That was law.

This quickly escalated as I switched from punches to stabbing Sprout in the face with a knife I carried every time I saw him, which was often, because Aly was awesome and my new friend and, as I’ve mentioned before, I was bound and determined to hang out with her until she realized what a great guy I was. So poor Sprout, who didn’t really do anything to deserve this ire, was pretty much getting his fucking ass kicked and his face stabbed on a thrice-daily basis.

Sprout became such a good effigy for all things ugly and green and goofy hippie that at the end of the summer, I found I could not imagine him being thrown away, so I claimed him as my own and set him up in the basement of the Selby House where we could continue punching, kicking, stabbing, and ultimately ignoring him to our heart’s content, which is how he spent most of the year gathering dust and skanky basement moisture, the only other roommate in that house to last the entire twelve months. Most had passed and now, it was just me, Smitty, Elroy, and Sprout. Oh, and that kid Toad. Um, and that girl whose name was also maybe Jessica? But not-Jessica and Toad were just crashing, because they didn’t have their shit figured out yet, and we were all almost out the door anyway. This of course meant that we needed to determine Sprout’s fate, because he was just too nasty to bother moving.

So one particularly skanky afternoon in August as the dog days wound down, Smitty and I, with Elroy’s help, went a little nuts. I’m not sure where the aggression came from although it had been a hot and fucked-up summer, but Sprout’s last stand (which Aly sadly missed) was full of kicks, punches, stabs, poked-out-eyes, graffitti, even some good old fashioned photographed curb-biting. Then things got really interesting when Smitty produced some firecrackers out of no where because that man has stuff for every occasion. We proceeded to drill holes in Sprout and fill them with firecrackers to try and blow his impossibly sturdy frame open; when that failed, I tossed him into the street and backed over him with my car.

And that little bastard didn’t break for a moment. He just wouldn’t come apart, no matter what drastic measures we produced.

Sprout had long since outgrown his initial entry into my world as a symbol of random hippie bullshit, but I’d be fucked if I didn’t say right now that some things are built to outlast us all, and you can throw them in the garbage but that doesn’t mean that defeat isn’t staring at you beneath that plastic lid.

Up until sophomore year of high school I got my ass kicked a lot, and even when I didn’t, the judging never seemed to go my way. For those who haven’t had the pleasure, the vast majority of fights when you’re a boy tend to end prematurely with little resolution and then a secret tribunal of onlookers determines, without speaking to one another, who won. It often doesn’t make any sense.

There was a kid at my high school named Steve who lived behind Dudley and used to play Dungeons & Dragons and Commodore 64 games with us part of middle school although he was sort of mean and gross at the same time. (I vividly remember one Halloween him teaching me that “your middle finger is only good for two things: picking your nose and fingerbanging.”) It was weird because we hung out but he was often mean to me–not as often to Dudley, because Dudley never noticed–and sometimes we’d get in fights. We usually fought because he decided it was the best way to impress other kids, like at Boy Scout camp, but then when no one was around we’d go back to being friends. And of course, I would always lose because whether a good punch was landed or not, I was a tubby 11-year-old and not a good fighter and on top of that, I was a cryer. Me in fights was crying and going sort of crazy and not being able to manage my body right and not really understanding what was going on while the other kid got a couple punches in, and this was frequently what fighting Steve was like. By the end of seventh grade, I was done with him and Dudley–well into high school by then–and I silently agreed to stop hanging out with him.

So by sophomore year Steve was no longer in my boy scout troop and I rarely had contact with him, but one day, sitting in the back of Coach Mac’s World Civ class where we learned all about Michael Angelo and the Sixteenth Chapel, this kid Jeff told me that Steve was talking shit about me.

And I told him that was stupid and he told Steve I said he was stupid and somehow Jeff became the broker for this communication that I didn’t actually want to be having, but somehow, beyond my control, it was snowballing into something gigantic. Much like the internet when you have some douche as the go-between you don’t think so much about what you say because you aren’t staring that person in the eye, so when Steve said something about my dad being a fat piece of shit I went beyond teenager shit-talking and accessed information that adults had repeated in front of me and said, “tell Steve that I’m just glad my Dad isn’t a fucking alcoholic.”

Which is probably why, tears of rage in his eyes, this kid who, by popular vote, had kicked my ass at least three times in middle school rushed up behind me while I was at my locker, took a swing that missed, and then announced:

“If you don’t meet me at the fucking watertower this afternoon you fucking pussy I’m gonna fucking stab you.”

The Watertower: three long blocks from school, right by the water treatment plant, there was a Watertower, and due to some sort of rule about exactly how far away kids had to get from school before our behavior was no longer the school’s responsibility, this was the location of choice for fights. If someone told you to meet them at the Watertower, you did. We had a small school. Repping was important.

Shakey and nervous the rest of the day I called off my ride from my Gramma (”I’m going over to so and so’s house”), nervously thought about the fight, and said, “well, maybe this will settle things.” The closing bell rang and I went through my usual routine and started walking there, but then something weird happened: some kids offered me a ride. I accepted, and couldn’t believe my eyes when we got there: there were 10 or 12 cars parked, and at least 60 kids, all of them chomping at the bit.

I got out of the car, and immediately, I cried bullshit. I wasn’t there to fucking entertain them. None of them liked me anyway. Outside of an increasingly undistiguished football career that had given me a state championship ring and zero playing time, I had zero stock. Steve had even less–he was in band for chrissakes–and no one there liked him either. It was fucking throw the losers to the lions day.

“Fuck this,” I shouted. No one heard. “I’m not here for your fucking entertainment, assholes.” I turned to walk away, and there was Steve, moving fast, leaving the friends he’d walked with behind, charging me, right arm swinging.

Three years since our last fight had blessed him with a longer mullet and me a lot more speed and strength than I knew I had. There’s a certain degree of amnesia about how awkward you are physically during puberty but this was a holy shit moment, like my body worked right for the first time ever, so when that swing came, I reacted on instinct: I stepped into it.

The punch went right past the side of my head his forearm catching me but without much force, and everything around us, every piece of shit kid, disappeared as I came up with my own punch hard, right into his face, gigantic tacky-ass jewelled football ring splitting him open, and everything got a little scary-fuzzy.

I remember little. Hell, I remembered little ten minutes later. But for the five minutes or so that the fight went on, it was a fucking disaster. I put the kid on his knees. I grabbed him by the back of his mullet and punched him repeatedly, back of the head, top of the head, face. At one point we tumbled, me still standing into a telephone pole and I ran his head into the pole. Crunched over a row of bushes along a fence, I felt a stinging pain in my left hand but came up with a loose piece of barbed wire and I’m pretty sure I was starting to wrap it around Steve’s head when the world around us came into focus as people started yelling about the cops, so I shoved him over and jumped into a car.

The car engine roared. My hand was killing me. I looked down and thought I was going to get sick–the knuckle had split wide open on the barbed wire, and I’m fairly certain that white thing I saw was bone. Steve started running home, only two blocks away, and I only remember this because some idiot in the car I was in yelled, “Hey, let’s stop to pick him up!” and I had to say, “I’m right fucking here.”

So instead they took me back to school, where the weight room was open and I wandered in. My football coach said, “Did you kick his ass?” and I decided that adults, as a rule, could go right to hell, but the trainer cleaned up my hand and Coach let me call my Gramma, who picked me up, yelled at me, and declined to take me to the hospital because I “deserved a scar for being so stupid.” So we wrapped my hand up and put a band aid nice and tight over it and it healed back together.

The next week people were all talking about the fight and Jeff even tried to get another fight going but I shrugged. “I’m done. Fuck off.” And I stayed done, and kept telling people to fuck off, which in my town was the closest thing to being left alone under a cork tree as I could get.

the climb up the hill and see the top…

Late June 1996, Minnesota heat, no air conditioning, just a couple open windows facing the street as I’m trying to sleep past noon, as was my college drop-out habit.

The house had rotated people a big bit so Smitty, Elroy and I all lived there, before half of the kids from Elroy’s home town started squatting on our couches. We all worked at First Ave and we all worked ungodly hours and we all made damn sure that we didn’t go to bed without several beers and some time on this fancy new videogame system from Japan Smitty had just picked up called “PlayStation.” Since the sun was usually up when we went to bed, we rarely bothered to lock up, which I imagine is how Aly got in in the first place.

“You should wake up,” she said, “It’s a beautiful day out,” to which I immediately pulled my blanket around me and muttered something along the lines of “leave…alone….naked.”

So she sat down and kept trying to wake me up. Aly had just finished class at Augsburg, probably had two or three cups of coffee already, and was seeing the day as half done. I was seeing it as not even worth starting. (Not to spoil the suspenseful outcome of this piece, but this dynamic has endured for quite some time.) I gave up and we began talking, but I made damn sure that I did not even come close to the edge of the bed. I had absolutely no intention of my feet touching the floor, and on top of that, I wasn’t entirely sure how I felt about Aly sitting on my bed while I was naked. I was entirely sure that I should find a Chesterfield if I was expected to be awake at the ungodly hour of 12:30.

So we talked and I tried to blink the crust out of my eyes and at some point I rolled over and Aly made the observation–maybe because I said I needed two minutes to get dressed, and maybe just because I smelled horrible–that I, well, I fucking stunk, ok? I drank like a half gallon of milk every day and rarely showered, which was my divine right as a stinky boy who was madly in love with a girl who didn’t reciprocate (except for occasionally making out with me at parties before going to pick her boyfriend up from closing the Uptown and Lagoon movie theaters). Plus, I was finding that the more I declared myself celibate and stinky the more I ended up having generally fun, friendly casual sex with friends of mine, which I was not going to complain about, not one bit. Nope.

“Seriously, when’s the last time you took a shower?” Aly asked.

“Uh, I dunno, what day is it? I try to do them on Wednesdays and Sundays, but sometimes I miss one or two.”

And then it happened, and in a friendship that had been running on a simmering slow burn for over a year, a relationship made up of moments, this was definitely one, because Aly said:

“I bet you you can’t shower every day for 30 days.”

NOW I was awake. I like bets. I don’t like being told that I am a certain way when I can prove otherwise, and she’d just tripped both those things.

The stakes: I showered every day for 30 days, Aly would take me out for an all-expenses paid date, dinner, movie, drinks, the whole deal. I missed a day, then I had to take Aly out for the date and pay for everything.

So wait, really, I mean, you’re going to ask me, “hey dumbass, if you’re so in love with this girl then don’t you win either way?” DUDE. It was a bet. PRIDE was at stake.

So we made the bet and we shook on it and at this point I was sitting up and Aly and I were all in each other’s shit and neither one of us remembers the transition but I am pretty sure that there wasn’t one, we just went from betting to kissing. (And she’d just told me I smelled terrible. Joke’s on her.)

Oh wait, Aly had a boyfriend. A different boyfriend than the boyfriend who she had when I first met her, and in a lot of ways, a much better boyfriend, except that he was always moving to Portland. I mean, always. Every fucking week Mark was going to give notice at work and move to Portland. Except HE NEVER MOVED TO PORTLAND. So they never got around to breaking up, and I had to sit and wait, because what was supposed to be a short rebound fling (as far as I was concerned) before he moved in Summer ‘95 was now fucking with my Summer ‘96, and the shitty part was that I really liked Mark and he was all too aware of my feelings for Aly and the fact is that I wasn’t entirely above fooling around with girls with boyfriends and here I was kissing her in my bed, naked.

As a rule, if you’re kissing someone who knows you’re naked in bed, then other stuff is finally going to happen, and it did, and I’m not going to go into details there except to say that I brought my A game and she didn’t find the fact that I was chatty annoying in the least.

She said, “I’d like to do this again,” and I said “me too,” and neither of us really addressed the Mark issue except that he really was moving to Portland in a month this time and if our timing was a little bad, it was manageable, and we made plans for the next time we could be together and left it at that.

and then all the shit just rolls to the bottom.

For reasons that will become clear in a later story, my natural inclination to not pick up on subtlety was amplified by some lack of faith in good things happening to me, so the second that the voices in my head started to gnaw at what had just happened, i became very confused. Did this mean that we were dating? Were we going to cruise out the rest of the summer until she was single? What if Mark didn’t leave? What if Aly didn’t mean to imply that we were together? What if we were just sleeping together? So on, so forth, for a few hours, until my head was just about to explode, and the phone rang.

“Hey you.” Her voice was sweet and hot and had just a touch of femme fatale longing. It wasn’t Aly.

Jess had just gotten back in the country from living with her grandmother in Germany, which she wryly described as being “sweet and wonderful and so nice except for the occasional racism” and she had crazy news and wanted to talk. “Do you want to come over?”

This was a terrible idea. This was trouble. Smitty and Elroy gave me hell. I was having one shitter of a day.

Jess had a boyfriend in 1994. I’d tried to break that up. I’d failed. But we slept together anyway, an intensely physical relationship for months. Her skinhead boyfriend wanted to kill me. We stopped. We ran into each other. We started again. She still had a boyfriend. We stopped. I got drunk at my birthday and propositioned her and she turned me down. She got drunk at her birthday and propositioned me and I turned her down. We had coffee together sober and went back to her place. We started. We stopped. We avoided each other. We got together, repeat cycle until she left the country. I cared a lot about her even though we’d never been serious. In some weird dysfunctional way she was the closest thing to a successful relationship I’d ever had–we were still friends, we got along fine, and we never got so close to wreck it. And now she was coming over with the news: She’d finally broken up with her boyfriend.

I can’t imagine that I actually said “funny thing about that,” but I tried my best to explain that Aly was like THE GIRL and we’d just hooked up and I was all confused about it and my head was not in a good place and somehow things got a little weird and we were fooling around and I felt terrible and then thought to myself that technically Aly was still in a relationship and maybe hooking up with jess was OK and things were getting hot and heavy and I didn’t want to hurt anyone and I didn’t want my heart broken and why the hell was this all happening at the same time and it’s hard to make a choice when you’re getting groped by someone and then Jess said:

“Wow, you must really like this girl.”

And she took her hand away and I said, “I really do.”

“This is a little embarrassing.”

This was the moment where I needed to say the perfect thing about our history and friendship and so on and I did my best and didn’t fuck it up too badly, but somehow she ended up dating Smitty soon after, which probably healed the wounds more than anything I said.

it’s always tougher the second time around.

Smitty and I walking from the parking garage to work, early yet, still light out, smoking, talking about Aly’s nutty roommate Flexi.

“I mean, I don’t always agree with the shit that comes out of her mouth, man, but what you’re doing is cheating, and it sucks.”

I made a bunch of excuses, because I was too excited to see Aly again.

So we got together at her place and Flexi was a crab about it and left and we had a great time. We took a shower together. Aly washed behind my ears. I’d managed not to fuck up the bet and it had been like four days, which was a record for me. It was sweet and nice and fun.

And then, a day later, Aly got to feeling really guilty and told Mark, and stopped returning my phone calls. There was a mix of annoyance and glee in Flexi’s voice when I called and she said Aly wasn’t around.

Fourth of July came up a few days later and we were partying in my back yard, leaning on the piece of shit motorcycle that I never got working, drinking, and we still weren’t talking, and I felt like the worst person in the whole fucking world and like I’d gone and fucked everything up and blown a ton of friendships to boot. I finally nailed Aly down and she told me about telling Mark and how awful it was and she was feeling pretty shitty and everything was screwed up and she just needed some time away from me to get her head sorted out and figure out how she felt and now I knew that I’d fucked everything up because when someone says that to someone it means shit is DONE. So I left it at that and drank beer and was depressed and pissed. It was fucking hot and I was pouring sweat and I felt fucking nasty and the next day I woke up late and gross and hating everything in the world and grabbed my towel and then said to myself, “why the fuck should I bother showering? Everything’s fucked anyways. Fuck the stupid bet.”

So I got up and I was about to get dressed and do whatever it was that required me to get out of bed anyways, but I stopped. And I thought, and I grabbed my towel, and I went to the bathroom, and I got in our shitty old clawfoot tub with the crappy handheld nozzle and I showered.

Because no matter what, I was going to win that bet. Pride was at stake.