Generation: SPAZ

This is a work in progress. It is a Fictional Autobiography.

Generation SPAZ

By Elwood Jay

This book is dedicated to:

My Family

and

Magnum McQueen

Torso

Ox

Brown Suga

fh

CHAPTER 1

          My name is Elwood Jay. I was born in 1985, in St. Louis, Missouri.

          This is my autobiography, but it’s also more than that. It’s the story of a kid growing up trying to find himself and where he fit in.

Or some other BS like that.

As with most people, I have no clue of what went on the night I was conceived.  I don’t really know, but I would think that most people wonder about that special night. I’ve never asked my parents about it, so I can only imagine how it went, and this is what I’ve come up with:  My parents, sitting around a fondue pot and hookah. The Polyphonic Spree plays in the background and a lava lamp glows amidst a cloud of marijuana smoke. My dad picks at his frizzy pseudo-fro and lies with my mother on the heart shaped shag rug, goes into a seizure, finishes his manly duty, and is greeted by the sight of only half of a condom still attached.

          Now, don’t get the wrong idea about me. I’m not one of those fruit loops that gets his rocks off thinking about his parents. In fact, as far as I’m concerned, my parents are still virgins, and they would probably go into shock if you told them that boys have a penis and girls have a vagina. I think of my parents being about as anatomically correct as Ken and Barbie dolls. 

          So far, my life has been the punch line to a perverted joke involving a pedophile, a nun, and a port-a-potty. I don’t know the joke, so I don’t really get the punch line. I’m hoping that someday, someone will come up with a good joke to go with that.

          When my brother John and I were younger, we would do the most retarded, inane, ridiculously stupid things. I was a science geek, always taking appliances apart and attempting to put them back together, getting chemicals and randomly mixing them. Pretty much trying out anything that came to my mind, along with my test dummy, John. After watching the movie, “October Sky”, I became obsessed with building a homemade rocket. After a few failed attempts I finally succeeded in sending a rocket about ten feet across the yard, at the expense of burning Johns hand, twice. I took a 2-liter soda bottle and drilled a hole in the cap. Then, I poured some rubbing alcohol into the soda bottle and coated the inside, and then dumped out all the extra alcohol. I had my test dummy, John, hold the bottle in one hand, and hold a lighter up to the cap with the other hand. The alcohol ignited and the bottle flopped out of Johns hand and kind of sputtered around on the grass. When the bottle ignited, it shot a puff of fire back across John’s hand and burnt the hair on his arm off. I talked him into trying it again after I “recalibrated” the rocket. He held it in his hand again and lit it. The bottle shot out of his hand and landed about ten feet away. This time, there was a big white streak across the back of John’s hand. It was funny the first time, and just hilarious the second time. Twelve years later and I still can’t believe that he tried to fire a rocket out of his hand twice. The next 4^th of July, John got me back. I was sitting on the porch playing with some roman candles and John was standing behind me. Just as I was about to light a candle, a huge glob of melted green plastic flew over my shoulder and dropped onto my thumb. It burned like hell. The shit-head had melted a G.I. Joe and dropped it on me. The plastic dried and I couldn’t move my thumb for four days.

Now, I’m sure all boys have pretend battles, but my three brothers and I would have all out, week long wars. We would spend days making battle plans, weapons, armor, and forts. We had catapults, cannons, swords, bottle rocket muskets, grenades, and flags. I don’t know how often we went to school with black eyes, all cut up, with eyebrows burnt off from firecrackers. I’m surprised Child Services never showed up at the house. We’d get off of the school bus and immediately scatter into four different directions. The bus wouldn’t have even pulled away before we were throwing rocks at each other and wielding metal and wooden swords. I remember one time when my youngest brother, Josh, tripped in the middle of one of our battles and split his forehead open on an auger and had to get stitches. This was also the same brother that “accidentally” smacked me across the face with a 2x4 and left a rectangular bruise on one side of my face. I say “accidental” because it was on of those “accidentally on purpose” things that kids so frequently do. I couldn’t really be mad at him though because it was kind of payback for the torment John and I put him through. We were all watching a documentary about Harry Houdini and Josh thought that if Houdini could do it then so could he. He asked John and me to duct tape his hands behind his back and stick him in his toy box so he could escape like Houdini. John and I grudgingly obliged (laugh), and duct taped him and stuffed him in the box. He eventually got the duct tape off but for some reason couldn’t get the lid off the toy box. It may have had something to do with us sitting on the lid. John got out a bottle rocket and I pulled the fuse out of it. We cracked open the lid and showed Josh the bottle rocket and told him we were going to light it and drop it in with him. Of course he started screaming and threatened to tell mom. We weren’t mean enough to actually stick a lit bottle rocket in the box with him, but we were mean enough to drop the lit fuse in with him and make him think there was a lit bottle rocket in there with him. He would have been just fine if he hadn’t started flopping around in the toy box. When we let him out he had lost one of his eyebrows.

          John and I didn’t just pick on Josh for no reason, it was always provoked, and we were just returning the favor. I believe the toy box episode was in return for the camping trip we had been on that weekend. Josh had waited until John and I fell asleep and pissed in a water gun. He had quietly unzipped our tent and hit us with a stream of still warm piss. Mom had heard us yelling and showed up so we weren’t able to do anything to him at the time.

          I wasn’t always picking on Josh; I even covered for him a few times. Like the time he was trying to imitate my rocket experiment and couldn’t find a lighter. He thought it would be a good idea to roll up some wax paper, light it on the stove and rush it outside to set off his rocket. As he got to the front door all the wax melted off the paper and lit the floor on fire. When we got the fire out I called mom at work and told her that I had been making eggs and burnt them and when I went to throw them out I drop the hot pan on the floor and burnt it.

          All the abuse we put each other through was just brotherly love, and it brought us closer now that we’re older, since we can sit around and tell stories about when we were younger.

          It wasn’t just me and my brothers getting into trouble, my cousin Ray and I were a couple of little hell raisers. One summer I was staying at my aunts and Ray and I found some little bottles of paint. We painted our faces up and when we had paint still left over we painted our necks and shoulders and chests. When my aunt got home she completely flipped out. Apparently Ray and I had used all my uncles’ model paint. That stuff does not come off easily. By the time my aunt had scrubbed the paint off of us we were scrubbed raw. It took another week before we were back to our normal colors because the model paints had dyed our skin.

          For one of my birthdays my dad and step mom took me and Ray to the Lake of the Ozarks and we went parasailing, but the most exciting thing we did was the rope swing. Ray and I found an old rope swing and after testing it out to make sure it was safe, took turns swinging off of it. I was showing off when I climbed way up into the tree to swing. I couldn’t climb and hold the rope at the same time so I tied it around my waist. When I got high enough into the tree, I grabbed the rope, swung out, and let go. I never untied the rope from my waist. The rope pulled tight and whipped me around before letting loose and dropping me straight down into about six inches of water. I had a huge burn mark that wrapped all the way around my waist and up my chest and back.

When I was eleven I moved to St. Louis, Missouri to live with my dad and step mom. I was moving from a small, all white town, into a neighborhood where I was the only white kid for blocks. The only experience I had with black people was through a Bill Cosby JELLO commercial. I spent my first week in St. Louis cowering in the living room, peeking through the blinds, hiding from a 7-year-old black girl who had thrown rocks at me when I tried to introduce myself. My dad eventually talked me into going back outside and I slowly made a few friends. This was when I earned my first nickname. I don’t think it was meant to be a nickname, but eventually “Hey you, the cracker in the red hat” stuck.

          I only stayed there in St. Louis that summer because my dad had built a house outside the city limits and we moved in just in time for the school year to start. I was soon roaming the dangerous streets of Bellflower. And by dangerous streets I mean dangerous street, because there was only the one street. And by dangerous I really just mean dirty. I wouldn’t even really call it a dirty street; it was more like a big filthy sidewalk. The town had one store, where you could buy beer and bait. There was one mechanic who only sold beer and ammo, and one bar where you could get either beer or herpes, or both if you didn’t check your glass before putting it to your mouth.

          I went to a HICK ASS school. While normal kids talked about sports and girls, these kids were swapping ideas on the best way to make love to farm animals (FYI: If your goat keeps trying to escape, put on some rubber boots and place their back legs into them). Even though I was the only kid around who didn’t think my cousin had “jus’ the purtiest little mouth”, I managed to make a few friends: Mike, Ben, and Nick.

          The four of us were always getting into trouble, and it was always for stupid little things. In shop class, we would pull bent and broken drill bits out of the trash and use the drill press to put holes through schoolbooks. I don’t know how many books and chunks of wood that drill press sent flying across the room. We would fire Co2 cartridges out the windows at the school busses as they passed by, glue chairs to the tops of tables, smear Vaseline on lockers and doorknobs, fart in library books and put them back on the shelves. For some reason we were under the impression that if we farted in a book and put it away for a week, that when we opened it again it would release the stench of a week old fart. We lived life by a lot of misconceptions. In fact I went through all of middle school and most of high school believing that tampons were spring loaded, and if a woman pulled the little string too hard it would fire the tampon out of her backside. We weren’t the brightest of the bunch, but we always had fun. Like the homecoming football game in October 1997. Nick came up with the ingenious idea to go streaking across the field at halftime while the band was playing. And by ingenious I mean pretty fucking stupid. It was 40 degrees and sleeting. Nick showed up in a jogging suit and at halftime stripped down under the bleachers, and sprinted across the football field wearing nothing but some running shoes and a goblin mask. After the game, they rounded up the usual suspects, meaning Mike, Ben, Nick, and me. They had the whole episode on video. They marched the four of us into the school cafeteria and stripped us down to nothing. Then they had us run a few laps around in the freezer naked while they compared us to the masked streaker on the film. Of course, none of that really happened; I just thought it was a really funny story. It’s even funnier if you had a mental picture of the four of us running laps, naked, in a freezer, you sick freak.

          That was also about the same time I discovered porn. It was the weekend, so I was home alone. I was nosing around the basement and found a wooden nightstand. Just like any other 12-year-old seeking treasure in a basement, I opened it, and found just that: treasure. A pile of little porno-books tumbled out. They had to have been from the 60’s and 70’s because the women all looked like they were trying to smother Cousin It between their legs, and they guys all had mud-chops on their peckers. I spent all afternoon sitting under the ping-pong table looking at naked women who were probably in their 50’s by then. And like any red blooded American boy, I was addicted. Porn had become my drug of choice. For some reason I never thought to swipe a few and take them from the basement. I would just sit in the basement and flip through them for about half an hour before running up to the bathroom with the images fresh in my mind, and fire off a few knuckle children. I’ve always wondered, over the years, how many future presidents, and Einstein’s I have flushed down the toilet. You could have probably found the cure for Aids wadded up in a tissue in the bathroom wastebasket.

          Well, one day I came home from school, dropped my crap in the middle of the living room floor and ran straight to the basement. The wooden nightstand was gone, and I never saw it again. I guess my dad noticed that it was the only thing in the basement not buried under an inch of dust. It didn’t take me long to get over that though, because not soon after that I discovered the endless possibilities of YAHOO! and Google. Every minors dream come true. I would spend hours looking up porn sites and taking the free tour. And then I learned how to multitask. I could now Google the computer with my left hand and google myself with my right. At the same time! I was learning new things at an extraordinary rate. I couldn’t do basic math, but I could “multitask” my hands raw.

          Each night I would get my butt blistered by my dad because my dumb ass couldn’t figure out how to delete the History files off of the computer. I spent most of my time being grounded. I would get home and find a huge list of chores waiting for me. However, I soon found a way to dodge those chores; by joining every after school club I could. I was soon a card-carrying member of the Chess club, Science Club, and even the Art club, even though I couldn’t stand the Art teacher. This guy was the fruitiest SOB I have ever met, and I’ve known some fruity characters. It was at a Science Club competition that I made out for the first time. But before I get into that, I have to explain how it was that I ended up at this competition.

          I had a girlfriend named Stacy. By girlfriend, I mean she was a friend who just happened to have a vagina. Stacy was the type of girl your parents warned you to stay away from, so of course, I was naturally drawn to her. She was always getting into trouble at school for things like fighting, smoking, and cutting class. Well one day she finds me between classes, hands me three cigarettes, and asks me to keep them for her while the principal searches her locker. I took them like a dumb ass. Well, the principal never found her cigarettes but he did find the pipe in her locker. I got home that night carrying three cigarettes, and no idea what to do with them. So I did the first thing that came to my mind; I tried smoking them. I made it about halfway through the first one before tossing my cookies off the back porch. I wanted to get rid of them but I didn’t know how to do it without getting caught, so I decided to hide them until she came back to school. I took the two and a half cigarettes and put them into a sandwich baggie with a few pieces of mint gum to cover the smell. Then I dropped the baggie into a cookie tin along with a few more pieces of gum for safekeeping. Then I hid the tin under my bed, inside a shoebox, amongst a bunch of other boxes. The next day, a Friday, I got to school ready for the weekend because I was going to spend it over at Nicks house with Mike and Ben. The last class of the day arrived; science class. We were in the middle of the lesson when the loudspeaker came on and a loud voice boomed throughout the classroom, “Elwood Jay. You’re mother called. You’re to get on the bus and go straight home after school. You’re grounded!” I am not shitting you. In those 5 seconds, my almost non-existent social life went straight to, well, complete non-existence. My step mom had found the cigarettes. She said that I had left some homework on the kitchen table and she went to leave it on my bed. Somehow, along the way of dropping a piece of homework on my bed she must have tripped and knocked my bed over, and knocked the lid off of  the shoe box, and the cookie tin, and unrolled the sandwich baggie. She never really explained that whole thing.

          Well, I was grounded, again. So I jumped at the chance to join the Science clubs’ Annual Science Olympiad. Instead of spending all weekend doing one crazy chore after the other, I would spend it in Jefferson City with thousands of other students from schools all across Missouri. When we got to the school in Jeff City I had absolutely nothing to do, I didn’t have a project. I hadn’t signed up for any of the competitions. So I sat and watched. After about three hours of butt numbing boredom, some girl just plopped down next to me, like, uncomfortably close for a complete stranger. And then she started talking. And talking. And talking. I could not tell you a single thing she said, until she asked if I wanted to make out. Somehow, that made it through into my mind. I nodded like a dork and she grabbed my hand and walked me outside to the school busses. She was still talking while we were walking. All I got out of it was that she was about four years older than I was. A whole four years! And she wanted to make out with me! The whole time we were snogging all I could think about was how much older than me she was. And the fact that she was probably the scariest looking thing I had ever seen. But she was four years older than me, practically a grown woman, so it was ok.

          My freshman year. Not a whole lot happened there, until the end of the third quarter of the school year. I had absolutely nothing to do with it, I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Remember all those weird, hick ass kids? Well, they were still a bunch of weird, hick ass kids, just bigger. I was standing in the bathroom, at a urinal, and I started hearing giggling. That was weird enough itself, but what made it weirder was that it sounded like a couple of little girls giggling themselves wet. I’m pissing and I keep hearing, “teeheehee…. Shh…shhhhh… teheehee… shhh…”, and then “WAM!” the bathroom door flies open and here comes the principal, the vice principal, and a few janitors. They grab me by the arm and try jerking me away from the urinal. I’m trying not to piss all over myself and wondering what the hell is going on. The other janitor opens the stall door and I saw the strangest shit I have ever seen my entire life. Three hick ass kids, one live chicken, a mason jar, and a toilet plunger. I stopped struggling, didn’t even try to keep the piss from spraying my pants, I just stood and stared along with the janitors and principal. The four of us spent all night in the principal’s office. I’m trying to talk over everyone, saying I was just pissing; I had nothing to do with… whatever that shit was. My parents decided it would be best for me if they took me out of that school and sent me to a Christian school. I don’t think they will ever know just how right they were, it was the best thing for me. Those were the best years of my life! Oh, before I forget. All that about the chicken and stuff was just some more made up BS, I couldn’t remember the real reason why I was sent to the Christian School so I had to come up with some filler. And it was pretty funny imagining what kind of crazy things you were imagining were going on with the chicken and those hick ass kids.  You really are a sick freak.

          So, two days later I was the new kid at the Christian School. I thought I was going to hate it there. Holy crap was I wrong. Because I was already in the most trouble I had ever been in, and I was the new kid in school, I didn’t really do anything crazy, just laid low the last quarter of the year. My summer was pretty much the same, lots of chores, no time to hang out with my friends, just a whole lot of horse shit. Literally, I spent my summer shoveling horse shit.

          I started my sophomore year still thinking I hated my new school. I just wasn’t aware of the opportunities that were being presented before me. My friends from the year before hadn’t been allowed to register at the school that year, so I was alone again, for about two weeks. Beka walked into my life then. We instantly became friends, and were always together. Beka hooked me up with my first girlfriend, even helped to make one of my fantasies come true; to make out with a freaky ass Goth girl smothered in black and white makeup. When we both came back up for air, I looked like I had just had my ass kicked by a mime.

          This was also when I earned my second nickname. As usual, it was all just a big misunderstanding, really! Gym class had just ended and my buddies and I were laying around waiting for basketball practice. I was lying on my back on the floor with my feet hooked under the bleachers. We were just killing some time BS’ing and I attempted to do a sit up with my legs flat against the floor and my arms just kind of lying limply at my side. It ended up looking like a scene from the Exorcist. Well, we had this crazy ass teacher, Mrs. Meolin, who had looked over the edge of the balcony above the bleachers at the exact moment I attempted my sit up. She swore up and down I was possessed. So of course, my friends, those cheeky little bastards, had to mess with her. They started calling me Lucifer whenever she was around just to freak her out. Well that didn’t fly well with the principal, being a Christian school and all, so they shortened it to Luci. So much better. So Beka started calling me Luci, so then all her friends started calling me that, and soon I became known only as Luci.

          But, back to Mrs. Meolin. She was one of those psychotic religious nuts. There’s nothing wrong with being religious, don’t misunderstand me, but there is a point where it becomes creepy and even dangerous. Case in point: Mrs. Meolin. We had a new kid named Eduardo come to school. He had a lot of seizures and would spaz out in class. We talked him into faking Turrets’ Syndrome so he could scream profanities at the freshmen during class. Sometimes we would cuss at the freshmen and just pretend it was Eduardo. Well, anyway, we were in the chapel for Mrs. Meolin’s class and Eduardo goes into a seizure. Some girl gets up and is about to run back to the school to get help, but Mrs. Meolin stops her. This crazy lady wants us all to gather around this poor kid who’s foaming at the mouth and about to bite off his tongue, and lay our hands on him and pray. The girl looked at Mrs. Meolin like she was retarded (which she was), says a few choice words (I shouldn’t say), and runs for help. By the time she gets to the school Eduardo has relaxed and is ok, so of course Mrs. Meolin is peacocking around the chapel as if it was her hands that had healed Eduardo. What a nut. Then there was all the school plays. No matter what play we were doing, Mrs. Meolin would never give me any of the good guys. I played the devil, the news reporter who goes to Hell, a manically depressed suicidal clown who went to Hell, and the head demon handing out the Demon of the year Awards. The closest I ever came to playing a good guy, I played a hippie Christian…who was gay… and most likely went to Hell.

          Even with that crazy lady around I loved that school. Everyone made it fun, even the janitor. The first time I met the janitor I was heading into the bathroom and he reaches out from the shadows, puts his hand on my arm, and says, “I wouldn’t go in there just yet. I just had to break up a monster turd with my hand.” I looked down at his hand on my arm, it was wet.  Then he starts laughing his ass off, “Oh, I’m just kidding ya kid.” He pulls out a little 2-inch piece of wire and says, “I used this coat hanger instead.” That guy was awesome! He was also was the one who gave me a great idea for taking care of a sore throat. He pulled out a bottle of Chloroseptic from his office and gave it to me. I gave my throat a couple of squirts but it just would not reach the part that was sore. So the janitor suggests I take the cap off and take a swig to ensure it passes over the sore part. Good thinking! I did just that. All of a sudden, I feel the weirdest sensation as everything from my lips down through my throat and into my stomach goes completely numb.

          It was also my sophomore year that I met my first love. Her name was Ashley. It was Homecoming, but we weren’t allowed to have dances at the school, so we had a Homecoming Banquet. My date was a cheerleader named Nicole, who I’d had my eye on for a while. I forgot all about Nicole once Ashley walked into the picture. I don’t remember seeing her at the banquet, I was busy ogling Nicole. I just remember seeing a punk ass freshman I couldn’t stand, Will, walk in with some girl on his arm. Everyone was talking about her all night; who was she, where did she come from, stuff like that. I still hadn’t paid more than a seconds attention to her. Well, after the banquet we all went bowling. Nicole went straight home with a few of her girlfriends, so I was dateless. Amos, Beka and I went to the last lane to get away from everybody, but another group came down and wanted to play against us. It was Will and Ashley, and some other people. I still hadn’t noticed her. We get halfway through the first game, when I go to sit at the little computer thing. Someone sat down in the chair next to me and I caught a whiff of perfume, so of course I looked to see who it was. It was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. She smiled the prettiest smile, with the prettiest teeth and the prettiest little dimples, and says, “Hi, I’m Ashley.” I went into shock and said something about liking sheep. I blushed and quickly turned back to the computer and waited for her to leave. She didn’t leave, just kept right on talking to me. I slowly moved from one word responses up to fragmented sentences and eventually to complete sentences. Before I knew it, we were talking as if we had known each other for years. It turns out her and Will were just friends from his old Lutheran school about an hour away and he had invited her to come to our homecoming. Will was getting all pissed off because me and Ashley were spending all our time together, so Amos and Beka distracted him while we went up to get something to eat. We sat around eating for a while and she was telling me about how she had always wanted to start a punk rock band called Mary with a Cherry, when the dj started playing the electric slide. I had never even heard of the electric slide before, and she wanted me to get up and dance with her. I surprised myself when I let her pull me out onto the dance floor. She showed me how to do the whole thing, and even though I looked like a retard trying to fuck a doorknob, I had fun.

          We all went back to the school to pick up our cars, and the whole way back I was trying to work up my courage to ask Ashley for her number. When I got back to the school, she hadn’t gotten there yet so I ran inside to get a drink, and I missed her. Will had jumped into his truck as soon as they got to the school and was trying to get her out of there before I showed up. That fudge packing nerd.

          I thought I would never see her again, but about two weeks later this guy I went to school with and his girlfriend  were out at the mall in St. Charles and they ran into Ashley. She gave them her number and asked them to give it to me. When they gave me that number I sat at my desk and stared at it all day, I don’t remember doing anything all day at school. I know my parents will remember this girl even though they’ve never met her, because that month they got a cell phone bill that showed three phones calls in one week over eight hours long each.

          I would love to tell the rest of the Saga of Ashley and Elwood, but this isn’t a romance novel.

          My junior year my friends and I discovered “Jack Ass.” I had been given a camcorder for Christmas, so after watching our first episode of Jack Ass, we had to try it. That night we recorded six hours of footage and dubbed it “Spaz.” My friends would all come up with the greatest ideas. I’ve been run over by a V W Bug, trampled by cows, lit on fire, thrown out of third story windows, dove out of third story windows, and had a washer dropped on me from a roof. I missed out on the one thing they actually did do themselves, which is a good thing I guess. Amos, Dirk, Steve, and Josh decided to try to take a 90-degree turn on a country road at 75 miles an hour. No one really got hurt, but the car was wasted and Amos had a big scab across his forehead that looked like a big shit stain. That’s how he got his nickname “Skidmark.”

During a basketball game in Illinois, my friend “Country Time” and I were sitting on the bench, when we realized that 90% percent of all the Christian schools we ever played all had the same mascot as us, the Eagles. So Country Time and I decide we needed a new mascot. We came up with all kinds of crazy mascots like the Hemorrhoids, the Undeveloped Fetus’s, and the Raging Sodomites. We finally decided on the Quail Eggs. The basketball team used to play a lot of “21” during our free time, and it was during one of these games that Country Time and I created a new game, called “Quail Eggs”. The rules were simple:

1.    Every man for himself

2.    There are no fouls

3.    You have to take a shot after four steps

4.    You have to shoot the craziest, dumbest shot you can possibly think of

It started out as just a joke but the game caught on with the entire school. Before we knew it, Country Time and I had people begging us to let them join the “Official Warrenton Christian School Quail Egg Special Shot Shooter’s Franchise.” Everyone was playing it, at lunch people would play Quail Eggs in the gym, after school they would play in the parking lot. It was everywhere. And Country Time and I were never paid any kind of royalties whatsoever. What kind of crap is that?

          For my senior year, I moved back to my mother’s house, and enrolled at the Buffalo High school. I had forgotten what it was like in a public school, and holy crap, the girls, the girls, the girls! They were everywhere, no matter where you looked, there were girls. There were tall girls, short girls, skinny girls, round girls, it was a girl buffet, all you can eat (no pun intended). I had been going to school with the same three girls for the last three years, so my dating experiences were non-existent. But at Buffalo, I went crazy with it. I lost track of how many girls I went through in Buffalo. I never did anything inappropriate of course, I’m a gentleman.      

          My family was a 4-H family (4H is a big farming, outdoors type of club thing for kids). I never really got into it like they did, but my mother asked me to sign up for at least one class. So I joined bowling. Well after a few months of being in 4-H some huge 4-H thing comes up. Kids from all over the Mid-West are going to this thing in Kansas City, Missouri for a weeklong session with classes and stuff. I-did-not-want-to-go. I was relieved when they said we could only send two people from our 4-H group, I figured they would pick one of the real 4-H nerds. No, they decided to send the two seniors; Kristi and me. Now, Kristi was a hottie. Everyone thought so, all the guys wanted her, all the girls wanted to be her. So of course, she had never spoken a single word to me.

          Well it turns out that the trip to KC was AWSOME! Holy crap the girls, the girls, the girls! We got to KC and they had rooms for us in the Hilton. We had to sign up for classes and enroll and stuff. That was boring. But each night, we would dress up and eat in the fancy ass Hilton restaurant, and then go change for the dance. We had a dance thrown for us every night. I couldn’t dance but I had the best time of my life. Because we didn’t know anybody there, Kristi and I were usually close by each other even though we never really talked. There were these two girls; they were Russian foreign exchange students that said they would teach me how to dance. Well they started bumping and grinding on me. I had no clue what to do, so I just sort of stood there, being the man meat in their little Russian sandwich. It was at that point that Kristi just comes up out of nowhere, pulls me away, and puts her arms around my neck and starts dancing with me and talking to me. I didn’t really think anything of it. So the next night, the last night before he had to leave, we were at another dance, and I was getting bored and tired of doing the same thing night after night. I stayed right next to the dance floor but was leaning back against the stage just chilling, minding my own business. There was this blonde girl from Illinois that I had most of my classes with, and we had been hanging out together all week, well she comes up to me and starts dancing on me, rubbing her booty all over me, and I was starting to enjoy it, when Kristi pops up out of nowhere. She grabs me and starts dancing with me again, just like the night before. Well to make a long story short we hooked up. We started seeing each other secretly because we were both dating other people. I just started giggling, thinking about that. Well, not really giggling, more like laughing really manly-like. I was acting all weird and suspicious, coming up with all kinds of excuses to sneak of and see Kristi. Even though we didn’t have any classes together, no one ever caught on that Kristi and I always had some new school project to work on together. Well, somehow, my girlfriend found out about it. I heard about it because there was a big catfight in the band room and it got back around to me. I wasn’t going to hang around to wait for my girlfriend to come find me, so some friends and I cut the rest of school. That night at work, I was a bagger at a grocery store, my girlfriend’s best friend Sarah stopped by to ask if it was all true. I said yes and she slapped me across the face like I was a redheaded stepchild, right in front of everybody. I had a huge handprint across my face for like four days, and everyone knew what it was for too. I don’t know why I even put that in here because it definitely was not funny.

          Well, the day finally arrived; Graduation. I got some nice gifts from everyone, and my mom gave me a green Ford Aerostar, that Amos and I dubbed “The Hulk”. That van went through hell and back.

EDIT (skipped ahead to)Two days after graduation I jumped into the Hulk and disappeared. I had told my family I was going back to Warrenton, but I was seriously contemplating driving as far as my money would take me. I decided against it and just went back to Warrenton. That night we had a huge party. I had a fifth of vodka to myself, and was on the brink of just giving up the ghost when I swear that Jesus the Christ Himself sat on the porch swing next to me and offered me a beer bong. Turns out it was just one of those hippie types that was a friend of a friend of someone at the party. Beka was there of course, and she took care of me, she drove me to Amos’s house where we crashed for the night.

          The next morning, or afternoon, we all got up just in time to catch the radio announcement: POINT Fest (big local concert), this weekend! We got online as fast as we could and got our tickets in less than 30 seconds. We were ready to roll. The day of POINT Fest we piled into the car, drove an hour and a half to the concert, got inside the gate, and waited. We waited for 3 hours inside the gate for one of Beka's girlfriends, Dana, who was being a punk and taking her sweet ass time getting there. I had never even met this woman and I already didn’t like her. Three years later, I married that punk. She was just so damn weird when I first met her! We got introduced like three times before I even realized she was the same person. Amos and I would be at a party and my friend Jasmine would introduce me to Dana, but I would either already be drunk or was just busy and not paying attention. But I do remember the first time I did notice her. We were all at a party out in the middle of some field. Everyone had their car or truck pulled into a huge circle with their lights on and everyone was just partying and drinking their asses off. I remember seeing Dana, even though I was piss drunk. She was wearing camouflaged pants and a black beer-frame shirt. I was wearing swimming trunks. Amos, Josh, Steve, Steve’s kid brother and I had been out camping when we got the call about the party and I had been swimming. So, we go to the party, everyone but Amos gets drunk and we leave. We give Jasmine and one of her friends a ride, so there’s six people crammed into a little car, five of us are drunk, and we are all underage. So of course we got pulled over by the cops. I’m so drunk I can barely stand, it’s gotten cold out and I’m in damp swimming trunks, no wallet, and no ID. The cops were threatening to take us all to jail, and everyone from the party is driving by laughing. We ended up getting off the hook since our driver was sober.

          This was when things went bad. During the concert I bought my first joint from one of my friends, Lesbo Beth. Since she was my friend I thought I was getting a good deal when she sold me a joint for $20. Apparently pot-heads don’t play when it comes to pot. I took that joint home with me and just looked at it for three days straight. I finally grew the balls to smoke it so Amos and I locked ourselves in the basement and he lit it. After he took a hit he passed the joint to me and I took my first hit ever… and had an asthma attack. Amos and I sat in the basement passing the joint and my inhaler back and forth. Mmmm, Albuterol and THC.  I was officially a pot-head. I wasn’t smoking for very long but I made up for all those years I had missed out on. With two jobs plus doing odd jobs on the weekend, you would think that I would have had some money, but I didn’t. I had two jobs as a waiter, the best job for a pothead to have because you get tips so you always have cash on hand.  Two o’clock every morning Amos would come in and see me at work and I would give him all my tips from that night and he would go buy weed. After I got off work I would drive over to his house and he would already have between 10 and 15 joints already rolled for me. He always had joints ready for me because I never really got into the whole bong thing, too hippy for me.

          McDonald’s would have this promotional thing on Friday’s. Around midnight or so, they would turn on one of those giant spot lights and you could get 10¢ burgers. So every Friday, after getting stoned, Amos and I would go and buy $15 to $20 worth of burgers and fries and go munch out at our friend Cheddar’s house.

The Blair Witch Project had just come out and the Spaz crew decided we were going to try to film a cheaper crappier version out in Dirks woods. We gathered up our flashlights, camping gear and the Spaz Cam and trekked out into the woods. After we set up an area to film in we realized we had no plan or any ideas for shooting a cheap crappy film. Dirk went down into a dry creek that had a rope dangling from a tree that had been used as a swing when we were younger, and he puts the rope around his neck and sits on his knees and from the angle I was at it looked like he had been hung. As I was filming him “dangling” from the end of a rope, I noticed some movement on the other side of the creek, directly behind him, so I took the camera away from my eyes but couldn’t see anything there. I looked through the camera again and continued to record Dirk and I saw it again, except this time Dirk jumped up and looked behind him. Something huge and white came crashing through the woods, flying down the hill straight at us. It took Dirk about two seconds to scramble up a 10 foot ledge and then we all split. The six of us took off in six different directions and ran our asses out of there. I ended up out by the highway and had to walk two miles, down the lit street of course, to get back to Dirks house. After the crew all arrived back at Dirks we sat around for about an hour before we realized that Steve’s little brother was gone, he had never made it back to Dirk’s. Steve starts freaking out saying that if anything happened to his brother his parents would kill him, so Steve, Amos, and I go looking for him. I stay in the middle of the road while Amos and Steve walk along the tree line one either side calling for the kid. Amos stopped all of a sudden and told us that he heard something, so Steve and I walked over to him and the three of us stand there listening. By this time I’m freaking out, I’m waiting for that huge white thing to come flying out of the pitch black woods and eat my face off. Steve starts calling for Randy and we hear a few twigs snap. There’s a long stretch of silence as the three of us hold our breath listening. All of a sudden there’s a crashing sound as something comes flying out of the woods at us and there’s a loud high pitched scream, followed by an even louder, higher pitched scream from me as I turn and disappear down the road. Right before I disappear from view around the curve I hear hysterical laughing behind me. I look back and see Amos, Steve, and Steve’s brother in the grass, laughing their asses off

EDIT (skipped ahead to): Amos and I drove out to Reifschneider State park for a little party that was going on out there, We knew almost everyone, but there were a lot of new people there we didn’t know, a lot of girls. There are three things I’ve learned about girls over the years, and since I’m married, and I no longer have any interest in “girls”, I will share these three things with you, the reader. There are three things that girl’s love:          

1 - A guy that can give good makeup tips.                                                   

2 - A guy who looks good in makeup.                                                             

 3 - A guy that can play a stringed instrument.

All girls, teenage girls, are closet lesbians. Some don’t know it, but a lot do know and enjoy it. That is why they love a guy who looks good in makeup; it is also why the whole metrosexual thing is all the rave now. Almost every girl, and woman, has a gay guy friend. Why? Because everyone knows gay men have all the best fashion and makeup tips. If you have these tips, then girls won’t need a gay friend because they will have you. The stringed instrument theory is one I can’t explain, it just seems like every guy I know that plays guitar, or cello, or violin or something always has girls or women hanging off of him. So, learn an instrument and slap on some mascara and you will have so many girls all over you it will drive you insane.

So, back to the party. Amos and I saw all those new girls hanging out at Reifschneider so I broke out the mascara and eyeliner. Sure enough, as soon as I stepped out of the car they were on me like R. Kelley on a 16 year old bed wetter. I walked off with a couple girls and we sat down next to a tree a little away from the fire and started drinking and smoking. After we started on our second pipe, the third girl pulled a baggy out of her purse and handed it to me. The baggy had little pieces of paper in it and she told me to put one on my tongue… so I did. She told me it was a THC enhancing drug, that it makes the THC in your weed stronger, so I took another one. Like I said, I wasn’t the sharpest peanut in the turd. Well, after I swallowed the two pieces of paper I pulled my pack of “cigarettes” out and proceeded to smoke one after the other and talk with the three girls. Four hours later Amos came over to the tree I was at and picked me up and told me it was time to go. Now, this is where the story is a little shaky. First, I’ll tell the story as I remember it, and then I’ll tell the story as Amos, Dirk, and Steve remember it.

          I remember lighting the first joint after the girl gave me the “THC enhancer”, and I remember sitting and drinking and smoking while the four of us talked the rest of the night. I also remember Amos telling me it was time to go. I remember walking with Amos and one of the girls to Amos’s car and getting into the back seat. I’m not sure of anything that happened between Reifschneider and getting to Dirks house, but I can remember the car pulling into his driveway and immediately jumping out of the car and pissing in the tree line. Dirk and Steven came out of the house and the five of us sat out by the lake and drank for awhile before retiring for the night. When I woke up the next day, I was tied down to Dirks couch, my mouth was taped shut, and the girl from the party was lying next to me.

          Now, this is what Dirk, Steven, and Amos told me after they untied me from the couch. After I took the “THC enhancer”, I sat by the tree smoking with the three girls. An hour later two of the girls left and the third one stayed at the party but went and passed out in Amos’s car. Amos said I sat there for three hours talking to no one, as if the three girls had never left. When he decided it was time to leave, he knocked on his car door, woke the girl up, and after she let him in, asked her to help me to the car. Amos and the girl (I don’t know her name) got me to my feet and pretty much carried me to the car while I struggled and argued that I wanted to stay. After they stuffed me into the backseat I fell asleep and was fine the whole ride back to Dirk’s. Once we got to Dirk’s I stumbled out of the car and crawled over to the woods and puked up the fifth of vodka I had drank. Then Dirk and Steven came out and helped get me inside the house, where I proceeded to tell Amos and the girl about a party I knew of out at Reifschneider that we should go to. When Amos said no, I jumped to my feet and in less than a second was naked and streaking through the house cheering at the top of my lungs, “We’re going to Waffle House! We’re going to Waffle House!” The four of them fought with me for an hour before Dirk finally pulled a jump rope from the garage and tied me down to his couch and taped my mouth shut. The girl slept on the couch with me, which was really gross because there was a huge drool spot on my chest where her head had been laying. I stopped partying for a couple of weeks at that point, no drinking, no smoking, just work. The day I started smoking again, was the day my life would change forever.

          Amos had been talking about joining the Army for a long time and he had been trying to get me to join with him. I told him a million times that there was absolutely no chance of me ever joining the military. So, I got off of work one morning and went to Dirks house. Amos had an appointment to talk to a recruiter that day, so I had made plans with Dirk. When I got to Dirk’s it was still pretty early in the morning and he wasn’t up yet. I grabbed some cereal and a couple of joints and toked out on the couch and watched music videos. Forty five minutes later a new music video came on from a band I had never heard of. The song was called “Time and Time Again,” and the band was “Chronic Future.” To this day I still don’t really know what exactly the video was about, except that it had to do something with the military. The video is one of those construction paper cutout animation things, kind of like “South Park”, just not as cartoony. The kid in the video joins the military, I think it was the Marines, goes off to war, and then comes back home. That’s pretty much the whole video in that one sentence. I don’t know why, it probably had something to do with being stoned, but right then and there I decided I was going to join the Army with Amos. I jumped into the Hulk and took off to the Wentzville Recruiting Station. Amos had already been there and left, but I went ahead and talked to the recruiter. Well, to get to the point, I ended up joining the Army, and Amos didn’t, the big-eared ass. At first I was pretty pissed about the whole thing, but I’m over it now, mainly because it helped me to get my life cleaned up.

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