 
### Dearler's

### Dog

and other tall tales of non-valor.

By William A. Patrick III

Copyright © 2010 by William A. Patrick III

Published by William A Patrick III at Smashwords.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

For Linda and our Families.

Cover art by author.

Photos by author and author's family.

This is a work of fiction. Any similarities between actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Chapter 1

I guess I should start at the beginning, but I'm not going to. All anyone needs to know is that I was an average kid growing up in the suburbs of Orange County. This story starts just as I turned eighteen, circa late 1978.

My drug life began, strangely enough, with Jesus. After finishing high school (where I did not drink or do drugs) I had no idea what I was going to do. I enrolled in a community college and mostly took art classes, but still had a lot of lounging-around time.

One day while lying on the couch watching T.V. my mother entered the room with the nastiest machine ever invented, the vacuum cleaner. The area around the couch in which I lay must have been exceptionally dirty, for my mom lingered long around my sanctuary. Finally she set the noisy machine upright and put her hands on her hips.

"You need to get a job," she said. Actually she more or less proclaimed it. "There's a coffee shop on the corner and they have a help-wanted sign out front, I'll even drive you." The idea of having my mother drive me to a place of business to apply for a job did not appeal to me, but to mollify her desire to have me employed, I told her I'd ride my bicycle and fill out an application.

I grinned to myself as I rode the ten blocks to the shop—it would only be twenty or so minutes out of my day, and it would surely be worth the disappointed look on my mom's face when I didn't get the job. After all, I had no experience, no skills, no skin clear of pimples and no nice short hair—not to mention the rather appalling wardrobe I possessed—and proudly wore.

I went, filled out the forms and raced my bike back home. I had resettled into my couch nest, found an amazing re-run of a Gilligan's Island episode that I'd seen a hundred times before, and breathed a huge sigh of relief. That's when the roof caved in.

"The pie cafe called," my mom proclaimed, "you got the job. Be there at three tomorrow afternoon." My gaping mouth proclaimed the start of the 40-40 plan. Baring some kind of accident, forty hours-a-week for forty-years lay ahead of me as I entered the Great American workforce.

Less than twenty-four hours later I was bussing tables and washing dishes. The dishes were stacked onto a large plastic grid-like tray, squirted with a sprayer that splashed water everywhere, and pushed into a huge, super-hot steamy box with doors that pulled down. I think I got paid just under four bucks an hour to sweat pounds of water out of every inch of my skin.

She had red hair. It was long and pretty. She had a Nordic jaw and rosy cheeks.

"Hey Ash, what are you doing this Friday?" she asked. "Want to have some fun?" I thought that most of the young waitresses in the café were hot, but this one, Melanie, was especially curvy.

"I'd love to do something, Friday," I stammered, I could feel a line of sweat run from my stringy sideburn to my neck and then down my shirt.

"Fine," she said, "meet me here at six o'clock, okay?" Needless to say I was elated. The term "cougar" had yet to be popularized, but there it was—a hot older woman had spotted the magnificent potential in me.

Friday took an eternity to arrive, and I had to bribe a guy to take my shift on an almost weekend day. I shaved (what little stub I had) picked out a clean shirt, and combed my rag-top hair. I thought about flowers or candy but THANK THE LORD I DECIDED AGAINST IT.

At the pie place I met a small group of people in the customer waiting area. It was going to be a group date, I saw, and it made sense—I was a stranger and group dates are far safer. Then, Melanie introduced me to her boyfriend. After that she introduced me to Peter. Pete, she said, would drive me. Bewildered, I followed Peter to his lime-green Ford Pinto and off we went.

It was in a basement. There were about eighty people in attendance. There was a guy in front with a pulpit, a guitar and a bible.

"Welcome to Jerusalem Hill Chapel," the extremely sincere, bearded gentleman said. He spread his arms wide, like as if to embrace the whole crowd. Then he picked up his guitar and began a rousing rendition of He's got the whole world in his hands. Most everyone in the room sang along, with the exception, of course, of me.

It lasted hours and hours and hours. We learned how nasty we were for being sinners. We sang songs and we prayed that we could change. We turned and hugged each other. For the record, I hate, with a passion, hugging strangers. While I could appreciate the Lord's sacrifice on behalf of our souls, I just couldn't get comfortable with the bible study or the bible study crowd there. I guess I'm just an un-save-able sinner.

Finally, with the conclusion of the Lord's Prayer, the leader began to wrap up the meeting. In the end we all bowed our heads and silently prayed to be saved, or to not sin or to win the lottery or something. While everyone's head was down (mine was up, looking all around) the leader spoke.

"Anyone needing one-on-one spiritual guidance raise your hand, and we will seek you out, after the study," he said. I looked at my watch; it was nine-forty-five. Soon, I hoped, I would again breathe non-basement like air and walk among my own kind, that of the unclean, unrepentant sinner ilk. My mood immediately darkened when, to my abject horror, I saw Peter's hand reach for the sky. Three hours of soul saving wasn't enough for Peter, my driver, and now I was sure I was going to be trapped in that basement for forever.

Luckily, Peter's sinning and desire to be saved was trumped by fast food. With my newly earned (and borrowed) dishwashing/date money I promised Peter that I'd buy him a double-cheese burger from one of Southern California's favorite dining establishments, In-N-Out Burger, if we could leave immediately. Peter's soul or the saving thereof, apparently his stomach informed him, could wait.

The next day I reported to my dishwashing station amid the knowing looks of a few waitresses and two cooks, Jameson and Anthony. Jameson was black and Anthony was white, which since Anthony had a bigger afro than Jameson, seemed strange to me. The afternoon was young and there were few orders at the cooks' station. There were ample clean dishes so the three of us loitered next to a long greasy grill.

"How was your night?" Jameson asked. He grinned and both men laughed. Apparently word of the date had spread, probably because I mentioned it to anyone that would listen. Pent up, I sounded off.

"Well, if you like sitting in a moldy basement," I began, "singing He's got the whole world in his hands, with a bunch of do-gooding empty-headed bible-thumpers that couldn't pass the entrance exam for preschool, then I guess I had a blast." I continued. "I went with this Peter guy, who, even though he loves burgers more than Jesus; brings to bear a fantastic dynamo of a personality by sitting like a block of stone for hours at a time, all while muttering to himself. Oh, he does, every once in a while, scream the word Amen. And the red-head?" I began, building up steam, "I bet the closest thing to sex she's ever had was sitting in a metal folding chair while rocking back and forth, continually repeating, that's right, and praisethelord." I said. "IT WAS A NIGHTMARE!" I shouted. Of course, on the other side of the order window, clearly within earshot, stood Melanie, Peter, and her boyfriend, who, as it would happen, was the Assistant Night Manager.

Everyone went back to their respective stations, with Anthony and Jameson red-faced and doubled over with laughter, beside the drawers filled with lettuce, tomatoes and pastrami. I felt stupid, betrayed, obnoxious, moronic and like a great big ass. I sprayed my dishes and put them into the super-hot steaming box, and closed the door.

The night passed unremarkably, with the Jesus crowd being distantly polite. Toward the end of my shift, Anthony approached me.

"Close tonight," was all he said. My shift ended at ten, but I volunteered to stay until the restaurant closed. Closing was no fun because after hours the crew stays and cleans the place from top to bottom. I wondered to myself why I agreed, as I bleached counters, mopped floors and wrapped and stored food.

One good thing about closing was that they left the pies that would not stay fresh on a counter for all to eat or take home. I was the only person interested—I set aside a half banana cream (3-slices) for myself. Later I found out that if you get to have free pie every night, for months or years, you get to not want pie. Actually, you may even hate pie. Especially for the creamy ones—pie equals death.

Finally, with our kitchen area flawless and bacteria free, Anthony, Jameson and I headed for the door. We had just passed through them when Anthony lit a cigarette. I distain smoking, because it smells, so I wished them good night and turned away. I figured they wanted me to close because I deserved free pie, which I had in a foam container in my sweaty, bleach-smelling hands.

"Hold up," Anthony said. He stood grinning, next to Jameson, next to a parking lot planter. It was a cool dark night and the surrounding stores were all closed. I realized that the cigarette was in fact, marijuana.

I later learned that there were two distinct crowds at the pie place, and they didn't at all appreciate each other's interests, and that they were very polarized. One met in a basement to love Jesus, the other partied. I was soon to learn that the other group's partying was as much a religion to the Stoners as the Hill Chapel sessions were to the Bible-studiers. And, I realized, they recruited members, and evidently, Jesus got the first shot.

I said what-the-heck, and took the joint, and with that cavalier attitude I began a journey down a very long and strange, and sometimes dark, road.

I ate all three pie slices while walking home. With my fingers. It was the most delicious feast I'd ever eaten in my entire life. I sang as I walked; my voice hit every key and sounded, to my ears (I can't sing) absolutely perfect.

I had tried pot before, but never really got high. Sometimes first timers don't get or know the buzz, and sometimes the weed is of poor quality. But that night everything clicked; I got blissfully high.

To put it bluntly, I liked it. I liked being stoned. It seemed to fill a hole, a void, and it made life seem more vibrant, real and interesting. Pot made life fun.

The next day I did what anyone who likes to get high does—they try to establish contacts or connections. I asked questions, but got only smiles from Anthony and Jameson. Who had it, where can I find them, how much does it cost, and when can I get it? I wanted access and I wanted to hold some personal stash.

At first nobody gave me any answers—Anthony told me to just switch my shifts to closing, which I readily did. Most nights we smoked a joint, some nights a waitress or two would join us, and other nights someone bought beer, and the whole parking lot became a party with every non-Jesus person joining us. Sometimes we had big bashes with a dozen people, and there was a lot of clowning and foolishness. I know I did my share, and became accepted as part of the group.

We... I... began to look forward to closing and the dark parking lot that was our own private club. Sometimes we circled our cars around like a wagon train. The cops cruised by occasionally, but all of us wore uniforms—busboys, waitress and cooks included—and the cops knew we were just blowing off steam, in our own parking lot, after work. They were also patrons of the café and we always treated them special. They left us alone, even waving as they drove by. They would turn a corner, roll out of sight and the joint would reappear. We loved that.

Awkward moments would come when one of the Jesus crowd left late, traversing the parking lot to their cars, while coming somewhat close to our group. Invariably, one of us held a joint behind his or her back, while others more-or-less hid their beers. We said goodnight and giggled, and saluted or did other weird things as they drove off. It was our own special joke that they were squares and that we thought we were über-cool.

A girl, whose name I can't recall, eventually began supplying me with stash. It was always a small amount, expensive and of questionable quality. Still, it was wonderful to know I had the ability to get high whenever I wanted.

I have to admit, one of the most fun things in the world for me, at that time, was pulling out my own stash, and rolling a joint. (I practiced rolling joints with tobacco, and became proficient at it—the trick, besides actually rolling the pot in the paper—was to get the weed the right consistency while excluding any stems and seeds.) And then, sharing it with my friends. It helped that most of the waitresses were cute as could be, and that while high, I could usually get them giggling like crazy.

Every once in a while someone would pull out a bottle of vodka and things would get crazy, but for the most part we were pretty low-key. We protected our sanctuary by keeping it on the down-low, as they say, because the managers or even the cops could bust it up any time they liked. But mostly it looked like a small group of young people just hanging out, shooting the breeze after a hard night's work.

All this especially worked for me because I could walk home and not worry about being too buzzed to get into or cause some trouble or accidents or other nasty stuff.

The pies at the cafe were made fresh everyday in the morning by a crew that came in at three a.m. There was one exception to this rule, two-crust fruit pies were sometimes boxed and frozen instead of cooked that morning, so that the crew could focus on fresh fruit and cream pies. When needed, the bakers would just bring out the frozen pies, brush egg whites on the top of them, and bake them. While closing one night, Tommy, one of the few waiters from our crew, came to my dishwashing station.

"Becky's folks have a cabin up in Lake Arrowhead," Tom said, "and we're getting together a group to go up for the weekend. Want to come?"

"Sure," I said.

"Arrange with Roger or Anthony to ride with one of them, and bring some weed... and a dish."

I had the weed but no dish. If I asked my mom for food I was sure I would get asked too many questions, like where we were going and what we would be doing. Already my mother had been snooping around me, asking if I was alright, even one time mentioning that I had a "far away look in my eyes, these days," quote, unquote. I was sure she was searching my room when I wasn't there, so I had to be careful.

So... how to get food for the weekend, without spending money that I didn't have and without arousing suspicion that I would be doing anything more than visiting a mom-supervised friend over the weekend?

Pies, was my ill-fated, ill-conceived all around terrible, answer. Later that night, when no one was around, I devised my wolf-like-thieving plan. I waited until most all the shifts had already left. Then I walked into the room-sized freezer and walked out with a box. That box was about two-foot long and ten inches high. Inside were six pies, two on top, and, separated by thick cardboard, two in the middle and two on the bottom. I exited the back door and placed the box among similar empty boxes next to a large dumpster. My bike was chained to a pole a few feet away. You may already have seen the flaw in my plan, but at this time, I still really liked pies. The hardest part of my plan was balancing my stolen bounty on the handlebars of my ten-speed for the few blocks home. We had a big garage freezer that the box fit nicely into.

Friday night came and Anthony picked me up. We stopped off for a bit of cheap fast food (tacos) and drove the two hours to our local mountains. The cabin was a two-story (the second story was a small loft) wooden-type they call an A-frame. It was off a long, winding dirt road surrounded by Jeffrey Pines. I know they were Jeffrey Pines because I put my nose right against the bark and breathed, and sure enough, the tree's resin smelled like pineapple, that's how you can tell a Jeffrey Pine. Anthony requested that I refrain from kissing the trees for the duration of our stay, and I said I would oblige.

When we arrived we found Becky and Rhonda, who were waitresses, and Tommy, Roger and Jameson. It was already past ten and everyone was sitting around the fireplace drinking cheap beer. With my usual style, I rolled a joint, as did Anthony, and we all got high.

At some point during the night, I got my box of pies, and since they wouldn't fit into the cabin's ancient 1930's looking style freezer, I stashed them in a cabinet.

Full of beer and weed, one-by-one we all found a bed (some sharing) and slept through the night.

Morning came, sunny and bright. I was up first, though I heard others talking in low voices. I stretched and dragged my achy body (the beds were spongy) toward the kitchen. The first thing I did was open the fridge. I noticed that its contents consisted of four twelve-packs of cheap beer (some broken open) of a kind favored by low-income college students, and not by many others, and nothing else.

All the kitchen cabinets were empty except the one with my pies in it. The cupboard was, as they like to say in the fairy-tales, bare. From what I could see, our entire food stash consisted of about forty beers and six now semi-frozen pies. Well, I thought, maybe we have food still in the cars or we'll make a snack run, which was a weird idea because the cabin was miles and miles and miles away from town.

Thinking it was better to be prepared, I retrieved my box 'o pies from the cupboard and opened it up. It contained six two-crust apple pies. Not cherry, nor a mix of nice different pies, or berry, but six apple. Shrugging, I placed two apple pies in the cabin's antique oven and turned it to 350 degrees as the others in the A-frame came to life.

We sat around the table, and had the following lively early-morning discussion.

"Do we have any coffee?" asked Becky.

"Don't look like it," said Tommy. He was going through the cupboards much like I had done ten minutes earlier.

"Any eggs or anything?" asked Anthony.

"I love eggs," offered Becky with a small laugh. Becky was always giggling. She was also entertained by anything the least bit shiny.

"I smell something cooking..." said someone in a hungry voice.

"That's me," I said to a host of smiles.

"Whaddya bring?" asked Becky, who was trying to smooth a strand of hair that was sticking almost straight out from her temple.

"Dude..." said Jameson, before I could answer. He opened the oven. All crowded around its ancient, gaping, dark mouth.

"It looks like... pies..." someone said. They said the word pies like it hurt them.

"Smells... like... apple..." said someone sounding equally injured.

It turned out to be just as I had thought—we had forty beers and six, two-crust, much loathed and maligned, half-frozen, apple pies. What followed then was a hearty discussion of who brought what, and whose duty it was to make sure someone brought something and also what a total idiot I was. I tried to point out that of all of us, I was, in fact, the only person who did actually bring something to eat, but my vehement protestations fell upon deaf ears.

In the end I sat alone, on the porch, eating apple pie and drinking brownish tap water. The others had left, muttering something about a restaurant up the road called Lenny's, or Benny's, or Kenny's or something like that.

We were a diverse group. Becky was a petite, ditzy brunette, barely able to handle the complex array of order-taking and food delivering tasks that her waitress job demanded. She once was found staring out of the café's front window, at our American flag. "It's sooo wavy," she said. Others agreed, while reminding her that she had tables waiting for their checks. She often forgot to give the customers their final tabs, letting them instead sit there for long stretches with nothing to do. She consistently garnered less tips than any other waitress. Once, after she felt that a customer had demanded too many refills on coffee, she deposited his check by standing five feet from the table and sailing the client's tab to him via paper airplane mode. The customer was still asking for more coffee, with his hand holding his cup up before him. On that table was left a single copper penny for a tip.

Jameson was tall and dark skinned and was rumored to be a ladies man, but he would not date any of the waitresses at the café. He kept his personal life private, but did occasionally throw enormous parties, one of which I attended, but more about that later. He drove a bright white Dodge Charger that had a really long, all but square front end.

Anthony was from Tucson, Arizona, and was one of the only older guys that didn't drive a car. Like me he rode his bicycle everywhere. It turned out that he didn't drive a car (or date for that matter) because he was saving every dime (with the exception of a few bucks for weed now and then) so he could put it into his prized love, an SS Camaro, which he and his brother-in-law were rebuilding in their garage. It was ebony black and had a white stripe around the front of the hood.

Tommy was a waiter that fancied himself as a new-era Errol Flynn. He did have good looks, even if his personality was somewhat under-developed. For the most part his end of any conversation, no matter how explosive, was usually a resounding, yup, or nope, or that's right. He did play the guitar, but I always thought that was just so people would pay attention to him. He only knew about three songs.

Rhonda was a little plump, with big boobs. One day I was helping her bring in some boxes up some stairs and I reached back to steady her, by grabbing her elbow, and of course, I grabbed her boob instead. I apologized, but she didn't seem bothered by it at all, which I thought was nice. She smiled a lot.

Mara was only a part-time member of our group, probably because she was rich (or her dad was) and gorgeous. All the guys fawned over her. She drove a red Porsche that had a personalized license plate that read "WANTIT". It was a strange choice for a vanity phrase, I thought.

"What does your plate say?" I asked one day.

"What do you think it says?" said she.

"Want tit," I said innocently enough.

"IT SAYS WANT IT... you idiot!" She yelled, and I felt I had hit some sort of a nerve.

"Like... do you WANT IT," she continued, "like... my nice car or me... even," she said. It turned out I was never one of her favorites, but she was pretty.

Bobby simply worshiped the notion that someone, somewhere, might think he was cool. He wore midriff cut off t-shirts even when it was freezing, so he could show off his abs, which were highly freckled and kind of flabby. He often said he would never have sex with a girl he didn't love. The fact that he was rarely, if ever, given the opportunity, whether in love or not, only seemed a minor detail to the wannabe Casanova. One Halloween he came dressed up in a suit and a fedora.

"What are you?" I asked.

"I'm D-J Hey," said he.

"So... you're dressed up as a DJ from the radio?"

"Right," said Bobby.

"You realize people don't actually see those who work on the radio, right?" I asked.

"I'm still dressed as him," Bob said while pulling his hat down to a very defiant angle. So there he was, dressed as a radio personality that no one had even seen, except for Bob himself, and that was in a little article in a magazine. That D-J Hey was the disk jockey of a very small market station, that played alternative music (read: Flock of Seagulls) that none of our crowd listened to (hard rock or no rock: Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, the Who) didn't matter to Bob either. But Bobby had one super-cool thing going for him, he lived in a trailer (previously the family's vacation camper that had fallen onto hard times and was permanently parked in their back yard, out of view from the neighbors) and his parents pretty much left him alone.

Then there was Don. Most of us lived at home (except Jameson, but he never invited anybody over unless he was having a mega-party) or with someone, like Anthony, who lived with his sister and brother-in-law. Don had his own swinging bachelor pad. Don was a late comer to our group, and I was grateful for his hiring at the pie place because it meant I was no longer the new guy. Don was a bit older, and was from Nebraska, and had come West specifically to party. Before the pie place he tried working at Disneyland, but found their rules, especially the dress and hair cut regulations, restrictive to his free-wheeling lifestyle. Because he had worked at the theme park, we called him Disneyland Don, a name he was not very keen on, but that stuck anyway. Like I said, Don had his own place, with tolerant neighbors and no roommates. Naturally Don's place, being only a mile from the café, replaced the parking lot as the place to meet. Also, some have noted, Don had bad teeth, I'm not sure why I mentioned that, but there it is.

Roger was a 'pie technician' or so they said. He was a strongly built blonde haired guy who came in at 3-am to start the day's pies. He was fun to work with but not around us much because of his hours.

That was our group, all hale and hearty warriors, who had declared war on responsibility, maturity, accountability, sensibility and general all around sobriety.

That was our group and I was part of them. I have always wanted to belong to something, to someone, to well... anything. I remember way, way back when I was just a kid thirteen years young. We're going back a long time, five whole years. I had found my first love. It came from a box my big sister's boyfriend gave me.

My sister Susan is four years older than me, and I guess she was decent enough looking because she dated a lot. Then she met Aaronn and they became serious. Aaronn raced motorcycles. He wasn't exactly a pro but everyone said he was on the verge of becoming pro. His garage was a virtual motorcycle shop, where he modified and repaired the most awesome thing I had ever seen in all of my thirteen years—a 1973 Husqvarna WR250cc motocross motorcycle. It had a bright red aluminum tank with mirror panels, a glossy black seat, chrome fenders and a deep black engine.

One day Aaronn came to pick up my sister and with him he had the box. He gave it to me; I was suspicious at first, my sister's boyfriends and I don't always get along, but I took it anyway. It was big, like a moving-box sized box. I took it to my room and opened it up. In the box was dozens and dozens of issues of Aaronn's subscription to Dirt Bike and Cycle World magazines, dating back to the early seventies.

From cover-to-cover, I read every one of those magazines. I read every article, every advertisement and posted all the best pictures on my bedroom walls (some of the magazines had a playboy-like centerfolds in the middle that you could pull out and make into a poster). I had found God, found love and found my purpose—to become the world's most winning-ist motocross racer in the world—I had just one obstacle, I didn't have a bike.

I remember the magazines had advertisements for bikes like Bultaco, whose logo was a cool thumbs-up, for a 125cc motocross bike for the amazingly low price of $179.00. And, to make it extra special, it looked pretty similar to Aaronn's Husky. It was from that point on that my campaign started. It went something like this:

"Dad, have you ever noticed how awfully cool the sport of motocross is?" I asked.

"No."

"It really is. Do you ever think about riding motocross?"

"No."

"You probably just didn't have time to notice how fun it is. All one really needs, to ride motocross, is a helmet, some gloves, maybe some boots and, oh yeah, a bike, you need that too. You ever think of getting a motocross bike, dad?"

"No."

"Probably not, but, now that you know how cool motocross is, you're probably interested in looking at some motocross bikes, right?"

"No."

"That's probably because you didn't know that this cool company called Bultaco makes great bikes that they sell for the amazingly low price of $179.00. That's a great price, right dad?"

"No."

"Here," I said, unfolding a shiny 1970 Dirt Bike magazine page with a Bultaco ad on it, "Did you want to look at this ad?"

"No."

"Dad, am I going to get a motocross bike?"

"No. You'll kill your sorry ass and then your mom will be mad at me."

So basically my dad said no and stated, in no uncertain terms, why. In a way he was right, everything I touched seemed to blow-up, burn, self-destruct or detonate and hurt me. As a kid I spent more than my share of time in the emergency room. I just had that kind of luck. I knew not to even try my mom, so I was at a dead end.

I didn't give up, though. Every time I walked into my room, and saw my posters (my favorite was one of Roger DeCoster on a Suzuki) I lamented the fact that some dads would love to relive their sporting days by having their son do what they did, and that some dad's maybe even rode motocross when they were young.

For six months I campaigned, pestered, whined, cried, brooded and became an all around jerk, much like the "shoot-your-eye-out" kid that wanted a BB gun in that movie, I forget its name. It went something like this:

"Do you want a nice apple?" asked them. (If it was anything not chocolaty and gooey and yummy it was referred to as "nice" in our house, like, "do you want some nice plain oatmeal, or do you want a nice six-day-old orange?")

"Well, it's no Bultaco one-hundred and seventy-nine dollar cool bargain motocross bike, but I guess so," said me.

"Did you catch the bus or walk to school?" asked them.

"Well, because I had no bitch'n motocross motorbike I guess I had to do one of those to things get to school," said me (yes, I thought I could ride it to school).

"Did you do your homework?" asked them.

"I was going to, I was going to apply myself fully to my school work and studies but then I realized that with no super-cool motocross motorcycle it would just be a waste of time," said me.

"You're asking for a smack, young man," replied them.

"A snack? I would rather have..." Then there would be a loud sound and I would go and sulk alone in my room, at my motocross alter, with a red mark on my face.

So, just as things seemed really bad, the most logical, typical thing happened—things got tons-and-tons worse.

It was Christmas day. I got a board game called RISK, a sweater, some socks, a jeep for the G.I. Joe I had long grown out of and a stocking full of chocolates. The neighbor boys got something else.

In Southern California winter days are often sort-of-sunny, steel-gray affairs with a chill in the air. That's what it was like when, after opening my presents, I walked out on December 25th, carrying my G.I. Joe jeep, to our front lawn. It was then that my world collapsed.

I had begun buying (or stealing) my own motocross magazines (the new ones were very different from the old ones but still cool, though they didn't have Bultaco ads in them anymore) so I knew what it was that I was looking at there displayed on the neighbor boys' driveway. I had even read a review about them. In the review they were nick-named screaming-yellow-zonkers. They were called that because their engines really screamed as they tore down a dirt track, they were bright yellow and their intense motorcycle coolness zonked you out. For Christmas the snotty twin neighbor boys got matching Yamaha YZ 80 motocross motorcycles, and I got a bleeding ulcer.

That was it. It was time to declare all-out-thermo-nuclear-war on my motocross hating parents.

But then something happened, instead of getting mad and carrying out my war, I gave up. I shut down. I didn't get angry, nasty nor did I plead, cajole, or argue—I just shut down. I didn't frown, snarl or gripe, I just stopped. I stopped caring. This is what life is all about, I saw, denial and disappointment and dreams that will never ever be. I was not going to be the world's best motocrosser, period.

I was polite but I didn't eat much and I didn't talk much. I just went through the motions. I sat in my room and watched the twins ride up and down the street. I didn't laugh when one of the idiot twins put a garden hose in the tail pipe of his great bike and, to clean it, turned the water on. I didn't laugh when it took more than a week to start that bike again. I was stone. But by not trying, I seemed to have succeeded when, at the dinner table one night, my mom stood up and directly addressed my father.

"For Pete's-sake buy the dummy a motorcycle so he can STOP MOPING AROUND LIKE A DAMN ZOMBIE," my mom said. She all but shouted it.

Like the Grinch, that winter night, my heart swelled to many times its original size.

"I got you a bike," he said. Time froze, I felt light-headed, and almost blacked out. "You there?" my dad asked.

"I'm here," I said. It was three in the afternoon and I had just gotten home from school. My dad was still at work, and would not be home until five. I wished he were there in person, so I could really talk to him (I hated phones then, still do now) but he wasn't. Still, I kept him on the line. "You did... really?"

"I got it right here," my dad said. "My buddy here at work was selling it at a good price. He threw in a bunch of goodies, too, like a helmet, visor and hauling brackets. I got some gloves for you myself."

I could hardy believe it, good things, for me, always came with a catch. I would have to mow the lawn for a month, or wait until my birthday or Christmas. I never got something good right away, just like that.

"Really?" I asked. Then I became intensely curious about the bike. "Is it yellow (like a screaming-yellow-zonker I wondered silently to myself)?"

"Yup."

"Is it an 80cc bike?"

"Nope, it's bigger, 90cc." He said, and I gasped.

"Does it have those knobby tires?"

"Yup."

"ARE YOU COMING HOME RIGHT NOW?" I all but yelled.

"Regular time. Got a job to do, son."

Of course that was the longest afternoon of my life. I sat on the front lawn, right by the sidewalk. The twins rode their bikes up the street and then down. Whenever I was outside they seemed to do that. Their dad made them stop, but not until after I saw the awesomeness that was their screaming-yellow-zonker YZ 80s. I later decided that sharing my dreams with the neighbor boys was not a good idea.

Eventually the whole twin family left to go to a softball or football game or something, and I was alone with my anticipation and my watch, which seemed to tick more slow the more I looked at it. Finally my dad's 1966 Mustang coupe (which, in five years and a lot of wear and tear later, would become the Ash party-mobile) turned the corner and slid into our driveway. Attached with steel brackets, to his rear bumper, and secured by rope, was indeed a yellow, 90cc machine with knobby tires.

Just as the YZ's had a nickname, the 1968 Honda CT90 Trail bike also had one. Its nickname, however, was slightly less glamorous than screaming-yellow-zonker. The Honda CT Trail 90 was affectionately referred to by every cool person in the world as the Toilet-Seat Honda.

I will now describe the aforementioned Honda CT Trail 90, so that all can fully appreciate its greatness.

It is indeed a yellowish color. It's not bright yellow, like some really cool bikes, it's an orangey-yellow (some models come in red), like say, how a school bus might be painted. Its gas tank is a big bowl-like unit located under a large, wide extree (say it just like that: x-tree)-comfy seat. To fill the tank one lifted the seat up from one side on a hinge. That combination was so similar to how a toilet bowl and seat worked that that is precisely how the bike got its nickname. But the seat is comfy. If one were old and had no ass, this bike would NOT be a problem.

Behind the seat is something no avid motocrosser could live without, a luggage rack. It's a place where Roger DeCoster could put his whole Samsonite collection, and after a race he could change clothes right there on the winning circle. But wait—the luggage rack comes with a big pad so that it not only can carry luggage, but also a rather uncomfortable passenger. Like if, say, during a race you spot a hitch-hiker, you can pick them up! (But you do have to choose between the pad or luggage, you can't have both at the same time, unless, maybe, the passenger holds your luggage.)

Oh, and the bike is street-legal. Which means it comes with all the great stuff that the government wants on a street-legal bike, like a headlight, mirrors, a speedometer, an odometer, a tail light and a license plate holder.

And it's a good sturdy beast, its metal fenders and thick frame make it weigh lots and lots, so you don't have to worry about going airborne on jumps and stuff. It really hugs the ground. Along with that is a nice solid muffler (with lots of nifty chrome burn-guards all over it) that cuts out any annoying engine noise—instead of screaming this bike makes a nice put-put-put-put sound.

It's a methodical trudger that will (eventually) get you where you want to go, steady and sure.

The previous owner of this model must really have loved riding it because the bike's odometer had over 90,000 miles on it and it had lots of scratches and dents.

As my dad untied and unloaded the bike (the Mustang's ass just about dragged on the ground, then sprang up angrily when freed of its burden). I pondered just where I went wrong in my representations of what kind of motorcycle I liked.

Did I simply not mention motocross? Did I not put enough motocross pictures up, of like, motocross racers and motocross bikes? Was I too stealthy in my motocross pining and worship?

In the end my I realized that my dad did what he always did, he thought logically, like Mr. Spock. He had a problem, a kid that wanted a motorcycle. He had a friend that was selling a machine at a tremendously reasonable price. Job done!

"Do you want to ride it up and down the street?" he asked.

"Umm," I stammered, "maybe we should put it in the garage where it's safe..." I said, anxiously looking around my neighborhood.

Oh, I forgot these," said dad. He then pulled out a pair of gardening gloves that had long wrist guards that protected anyone against rose bush thorns. As an added bonus he had scribed the word Ash in marker on them. The third part of this unholy trinity was a helmet. It was bright yellow and had a big (grinning like a fool) smiley face on each side, like how football helmets had logos. I guess I was part of team pop-culture-smiley. Attached to the smiley helmet was a plastic amber bubble shield so that while motocrossing one could keep any nasty bugs off one's face while gazing upon the whole world through a jaundiced, slightly-scratched haze. The perfect trifecta!

My dad started with nothing and eventually retired with three pensions. He spent 25 years in the Marine Corps and rose to the rank of Master Gunnery Sergeant. He didn't do that by being timid and indecisive. He did it by barking orders and solving problems. Until my mom issued her 'get him a motorcycle' proclamation, Sarge did not have a motorcycle problem. After that statement he did. After networking with his buddies, he had that problem solved in a way that should have made everyone happy—his buddy was unburdened of a bike he no longer wanted, the deal was the most cost-effective in the history of all deals ever made in the universe, and his bratty kid now owned a motorbike—problem solved, case closed, end of story.

As a thirteen-year-old I failed to grasp the speed and efficiency in which my dad solved his dilemma. After this 'incident' as I called it, I became obsessed with getting exactly what I wanted (if I could possibly pull it off) regardless of the consequences. That way of thinking came to figure prominently later in my life, when I was on a dark road and refused to acknowledge the truth.

Even though I would eventually get the bike I wanted, I never did join the ranks of great riders like Roger DeCoster, Malcolm Smith and Bob Hannah. Five years later, though, I did join another group. The pie place-partiers embraced me with open arms, and I returned their affection.

I know I previously mentioned the new cook at the pie place, Disneyland Don. I also mentioned that Don had his own bachelor pad.

The parking lot was a little too exposed, and we had begun to attract a lot of attention from the Jesus crowd, café management and even nearby store owners. All it took was a moment of carelessness, a beer bottle here, a twelve pack carton there and once even some dope left a broken bong on the curb beside our spot. Those things did not go unnoticed. Soon we got the feeling that maybe our joint smoking and drinking days in the lot were numbered.

With his timing impeccable, we met Disneyland Don. Don was a solid, no nonsense, regular-guy, Midwesterner. He was in California to party, and made no bones about it. He liked to smoke weed but mostly he loved the game.

"Come over tonight, I'm telling you the parking lot is bad news," Don said to us one evening. We had been taking a break around the soda dispenser helping ourselves to cola. We packed steel milk-shake tumblers with ice and filled them to the top. "I'm telling you, I've only been here a week and you guys are all anyone talks about around here."

"It's not that bad..." began Bobby.

"Actually it is," said Jameson. "Last week someone drove over one of the parking lot's planters, and you can still see the smashed landscaping and tire marks. Even if it's wasn't one of us, everybody thinks it was."

"Anyone notice the cops lately?" Mara asked. "They don't wave and they stare at us a lot more."

"And it's freezing," I said. "I get damp doing the dis..."

"How far is your place?" interrupted Becky.

"About a mile west of here," Don said, "Chestwood Apartments, across from Mickey's Pizza. Number nineteen. Everyone bring a six-pack."

And that was that. We never partied in the parking lot again. Around the café we pretended that 'we didn't do that (party) anymore' but we in fact were just not visible. Don's place was farther away from my house than the café, but still manageable by bike or skateboard. It was in a low, sprawling, brown 'bungalow' style complex with lots of space between the units and a huge parking lot that separated it from a busy street. Its bungalows had a dark out-of-the-way feeling with tall bushes and hedges between them.

Inside was furnished through a series of garage sale raids that netted an old couch that smelled like mold, a kitchen table finished in Formica, four mismatched chairs, four folding chairs, milk crates ladened with boards on top of which sat a small television, and a dark wooden coffee table that had badly scratched claw-foot legs. Everything was brown or dark green and pretty well worn. The good thing about the place was that you never had to worry about knocking something over and breaking it—indestructible garage sale stuff was all Disneyland Don would own. Within a week that place felt like home and all of us were huge fans of the game.

The game was nothing new, it fact it was as old as time itself, but we had never heard of it before Don. It was just a stupid drinking game that college kids played, but our group made it fun. To play Quarters you need a cup, a quarter, a towel, an ashtray (even though none of us smoked cigarettes or cigars) and lots and lots and lots of beer.

What makes the game fun is the rules and how individual members seem to react to them, time and time again. The rules were as follows:

No Brainfades.

No towel off the table.

No quarter in the ashtray.

To withdraw from the game before it's over one must do the

Chicken Dance. (The exception to this is if you pass out.)

That was pretty much it. Some people make up all sorts of rules like no cursing, no saying somebody's name, no pointing... etcetera, etcetera. But we didn't need any weird stuff, those four rules and our own predisposed shortcomings were all that was needed to have fun.

Early on I was only a spectator, but I was soon drawn into the roundtable arena. We sat around Don's Formica table in regular or folding chairs. On the table was the towel, essential for cleaning up beer splashed by the quarter and for wiping the quarter off between turns. The ashtray sat in the center of the table, pretty much as just a booby-trap. The little 5-ounce glass sat in front of the player whose turn it was. The player had to bounce the quarter off the table and make it into the glass; if he or she did, that person could select any other player and make them drink the four ounces of beer in the glass. If they missed the quarter and little glass of beer was passed to the player on the right.

Also causing a player to drink was breaking the rules. If a player took the towel off the table, he drank. If a player accidentally got the quarter into the ashtray, he drank. If the player did anything that seemed forgetful or odd (Brainfade) they drank. If a player wanted out of the game before all of the beer was gone, they had to do the Chicken Dance.

Bobby was first to shoot because he happened to grab the glass. He made his first shot.

"Drink." He slid the glass toward Mara. Mara sipped the beer, which brought howls from all at the table.

"Down it!" everyone shouted. Bobby refilled his glass and held the quarter flat, between his thumb and middle finger. He adeptly bounced it off the table and back into the glass.

"Drink," he said while sliding the glass back to Mara.

"Dickhead..." she muttered.

"Down it this time," said Bobby. He seemed to be making it clear that if she didn't he would target her all night. She downed the glass of beer in one gulp, and then stuck out her tongue. Bobby hit his next shot.

"Drink..." he said, passing the glass again to Mara.

"Ass-freaking-dickhole!" was all Mara could say. She drank and moved the ashtray directly behind the glass in front of Bobby. "This means war, fuckface," she said. Everyone laughed. We were all still sober yet Mara had, in two minutes, already drank three glasses of beer.

I began taking the towel and playing with it. I held one corner fast to the table and swung the other parts in the air, flapping it around like a flag. It caught Bob's attention, and, when he made his forth shot in a row, he pushed the glass toward me.

"Drink," was all he said.

"Easy on him," said Jameson. I was a nineteen-year-old light-weight.

"Then tell him to leave the damn towel alone," said Bob.

"Leave the damn towel alone," said Jameson. Bob tried and missed his next shot and passed the glass to me. I held the quarter to the bridge of my nose and let it run down to the table, only to watch it take a big bounce and pop Don in the chest. He caught it off his shirt front. Luckily quarter-off-the-table wasn't a drink rule. I passed the glass to Jameson.

"Like this, bonehead," he said while looking at me. He bounced the quarter flat, and it arced into the glass. "Drink, douche," he said while pushing the glass toward Bobby. Jameson always came to the aid of the girls. Jameson made Bob drink four straight times. After finally missing, he passed the glass to Becky.

"Whose turn is it?" she promptly asked.

"Brainfade... drink!" Everyone said to Becky, who was just passed the glass and quarter, both of which sat directly in front of her.

"Oh, man..." she said. After drinking Becky slammed the quarter onto the table so hard that it careened off it and rolled all the way into the kitchen and then wound up under the fridge. "Shit!" she said. We all agreed that that constituted another "Brainfade" and she had to drink again. "Oh man," she said a second time. She passed the glass to Don. "Where's the quarter?" she asked.

"Brainfade número tres!" We all said shouted together. "Drink!" She was passed the glass again and downed it. All knew the quarter was under the fridge, still.

"We need a new quarter," Bobby said.

"There must be ten bucks under that thing," Don said. He suggested that Becky pick a seat facing the living room instead of the kitchen. "We can move the couch easy enough."

Despite Jameson's protests, Don hit me and Mara three times each. After he missed he passed the glass to Mara. She took a new beer and filled the glass to the very top brim. She held the quarter flat, about two inches over the table, and, in a sharp snap, popped the thing into the full glass with hardly a splash.

"Hope you're thirsty, you super-huge douche," she said while passing the glass to Bobby. She made him drink four more times and hit me once before finally missing. She passed the glass to Bobby. Becky took the towel and used it to squish a bug that was crawling up the wall beside her.

"Drink!" everyone shouted. She froze for a moment, and then realized what she had done.

"Crap!" she said, and drained the glass. So far, Becky had not been targeted once, yet was already half drunk.

"Don, we need a new towel," said Mara. Apparently the squished bug towel needed to be retired. An hour went by and Mara and Bobby were still going at it. At her turn, Mara stood up.

"That's it for me, I'm about to barf beer all over you guys," she said.

"Chicken Dance!" everyone yelled this together. The Chicken Dance was the only way out of the game if it were still going. If one wanted out of the game one had to:

1) Wait until it was their turn.

2) Stand up and announce you wanted out.

3) Place both thumbs firmly in your armpits.

4) Flap your elbows like a chicken and hop up and down on

one foot.

5) Repeat the words "I'm a weak-dick".

6) Do this until a player makes a shot.

"How about this instead?" she asked. As I had mentioned earlier, Mara was a stunning blonde who drove a Porsche. Instead of the chicken thing she began to dance like she would in a club, swinging her hips and throwing around her long blonde hair in arcs. Becky rolled her eyes but all the boys stared hard. After her dance, she bowed.

"How was that?" she asked.

"Great," Bobby said, "Now do the Chicken Dance or take your fucking turn."

After Mara's dance I fell off my chair. They told me later that they had to carry me to the couch. At sunrise I awoke with a large, dark stain on my crotch, and the couch now smelled worse than ever.

We closers seemed to play the game every night. Don would come by our stations.

"We're on..." He would say, and each one of us would reply.

"I'm in..." or give some excuse to bow out. Sometimes Rhonda joined us and a lot of times Mara was 'busy' meaning she had a hot date. She dated a lot.

The game often got fever-pitched rowdy, but Don's neighbors never complained and the cops never came. One day we brought a tape recorder to the apartment and recorded the game. The result was the stupidest, most unintelligent, un-listen-able hour of garbage ever created. We thought we were funny and cool but without the buzz and clouds of intoxication, we were nothing more than an apartment full of sad, idiotic fools. But still, we had fun.

Things did get serious a time or two; one of our biggest worries was our alcohol intake and the tolerance and dependence we seemed to be building daily. If there wasn't a game, many of us still had to get high or drink anyway, and the game became a way to cover, in an acceptable way, our abuse of intoxicants.

One night, with the game called off, Bobby leaned against my dish station and bemoaned the fact that there was nothing to do.

"Hey Pisspants, want to try something new? You won't have to worry about any accidents." He asked. Pisspants became my new moniker after that 'couch' incident.

"Sure, what's up?"

"Just meet me in the parking lot."

After closing I met Bobby at his prized possession, his Volkswagen Karmann Ghia. It was cherry red and full of polished chrome. He told me it had a Porsche engine with a four-barrel carburetor. I knew for a fact it could reach 110 miles per hour because I personally drove it that fast (one night at two a.m. on the way to Big Sur).

After stopping at a liquor store (we picked up two six packs of Mickey's Big-Mouth Malt Liquor) Bob drove to an apartment complex I had never been to before.

The rent here is through the roof," he said, "but they have all the amenities." Soon we stood before a large Jacuzzi. "Just follow my lead," he whispered. Bob hopped over the locked, chest-high fence. "Forgot my key," he said in a very loud voice. He opened the gate from the inside and let me in.

"I'm so glad we moved to this nice place," I said in a loud, very unconvincing, voice. There were two people in the sauna already, a fat man and a woman. We slid into the hot water and popped our beers.

"What's your apartment number?" asked the fat man.

"Um," Bobby hesitated and then trudged full speed ahead. "13B. We like it here because we're friends with the manager." Of course you can just about guess what the fat man was going to say next.

"I'm the manager." He said. "You two have exactly one minute to disappear or I call the cops have you arrested for trespassing."

We beat a fast retreat, but only to a similar apartment complex right next to the fat man's.

"The tubs here are smaller, but just as hot," Bob said. We sat there for two hours, drinking our Mickey's and pissing it right back out and into the pool. Shriveled up and ready to pass out from the hot water we soon called it a night. With wet hair, that still had steam rising from it, we trashed our empty bottles in a dumpster, and with wobbly legs and boozy breath we got into the Ghia.

We were on a large six-lane street not more than a mile from the pie place where my bike was still chained to a light pole. We were driving under a freeway and toward a red light. Feeling that, at fifty yards before the light, we had yet to even slow, I screamed.

"RED LIGHT!" Bobby hit the brakes as hard as he could. The Ghia, an old car built before the invention of anti-lock brakes, broke into a long skid. We came to a stop exactly in the center of the intersection. One-hundred yards down the road, stood a motorcycle cop next to a car. He had just given a motorist a ticket and the shrieking skid of the Ghia had definitely caught his attention. After the light turned green we sheepishly crept toward him. He walked out into the street and waved toward the curb. Bobby pulled over. We were drunk as skunks, and I was in especially bad shape. That we could have just killed someone or ourselves wasn't something we worried about. The cop in front of us, however, was a different story.

"Keep your mouth shut and try not to look so buzzed," Bob said. The cop put Bobby through over an hour of field-sobriety tests. Much to the absolute chagrin of the officer, Bob passed every damn one of them. I was nervous as hell but I had never seen Bobby calmer. He was playing some kind of contest of wills, as he stood on one leg with his head back, but as unwavering as a stone statue. As I mentioned earlier, tolerance was as much an asset as it was an annoyance. The cop was still shaking his head as we drove away.

Chapter 2

I had a pretty miserable acne problem. I dreaded the flare-ups that seemed to come just at the wrong times. I saw doctors and dermatologists; I took pills, used creams and lotions. The creams and lotions didn't seem to work, but the pills did, but only if I took them exactly the way they were prescribed, which in my case was two a day. They made my stomach hurt and gave me the most horrible smelling burps.

I eventually stopped using everything and invented my own system, which worked the best for me. The MOST important part of the system is this: within the first ten minutes of waking, start your day by munching a whole, medium to large sized, raw carrot.

Next remove sodas entirely from your diet. That's basically it, except for one other thing—try also going a week or two avoiding certain foods and see if they are triggers that cause the flare-ups. I tried removing things like chocolate, milk (I took a calcium supplement), processed foods and deep fried foods. I was surprised at what caused my outbreaks, and I just limited those things in my diet, and got better skin.

Talking about clear faces, acne wasn't the only thing that marked mine, because my parents had a cat named Mr. Stinky (his real name was Madison Avenue, but I renamed him with what I thought was a more fitting moniker). Mr. Stinky was a smallish, orange kitty with a 50-50 bar like face—one side was completely white, the other was bright orange. He had razor-sharp claws. He was also very temperamental; one moment he was rubbing up against you, the next moment he was attacking you. He was like a jack-in-the-box, each time you petted him was akin to turning the crank on the box toy. With each stroke of his fur his eyes would get a little wider. Then, in an instant, he would spring. He usually caught me on my nose, earlobe or cheek. I learned to only touch him at arms length, but that strategy had its drawback—arms, wrists and hands were targets also.

My ill-conceived revenge plan began one sunny day alongside my parent's pool. Mr. Stinky was in a generous mood that afternoon; he had leapt to my lap, closed his eyes and began to purr. In a moment of inspiration, I rose with Stinky cradled in my arms. I placed a hand over his eyes. Then I slowly and carefully walked down the steps to the shallow end of my parent's pool. Most can now see where this plan was going to go terribly wrong. There I was, shirtless, waist-deep in a large blue pool, with a temperamental, razor-sharp clawed, eyes-covered-up, feline in my arms. My plan was to show Stinky his peril—the body of water around him. He would see that I was the only one that could save him from a terrible watery fate, and as he clung to me I would rescue him and we would bond as I walked back up the steps and back to dry land. Well, it didn't turn out that way.

"Surprise!" I exclaimed as I removed my hand. "Look, water everywhere!" I said. Just as I had a surprise for Mr. Stinky, he had a surprise for me. Instead of clinging to his only hope of staying dry and cringing in fear, Stinky went all Cape Canaveral on me. Like an Apollo rocket, Stinky launched his water-hating furry self to the nearest concrete lip of the pool's edge. The springboard, of course, was my bare chest. Mr. Stinky almost made it. At least half of him made it—his ass-end caused quite a splash. He recovered, though, and walked away, shaking his hind legs to rid them of water, while glaring at me. He retreated, through the doggie-door, and on into the house.

It was the last time he would ever climb into my lap. It was also the last time I ever tried anything weird with that cat. My chest, I saw, looked like someone had filled a colander with spaghetti sauce. Twenty tiny holes, caused by razor-sharp claws, now leaked drips of bright red fluid that ran all the way to the waistline of my swim-shorts. Mr. Stinky did not like water and, apparently, he also did not like having dull claws.

In the early eighties my three German cousins rented a car, and toured Southern California. They had done their homework and visited a lot of great spots; they went everywhere from Disneyland to Death Valley. They stayed in lodges, but also spent two nights with us at my parent's house. They had a blast, but this story is not about them. It's about Hazel. Hazel was another cousin of mine. And unlike my German boy cousins, Hazel did not have a good job and a big traveling budget. In fact she was always broke, but didn't mind traveling on the cheap, as they say. After hearing the stories of the fantastic land that is called California, from her siblings, Hazel formed a plan.

The first thing she did was to inform my parents she would be in town for two weeks. Then she sent a box of her clothes, via the mail, to avoid airline baggage fees, or to travel lighter or for some other reason. This kind off put off my parents when they realized she intended on spending the entire time staying with us, sort-of freeloading, like. They didn't want to make waves in the family, so they agreed.

To my parent's great dismay, a blonde, rosy-cheeked, Daisy-duke shorts wearing, braless, tattooed young Germanic woman showed up at our doorstep one day. I laughed my ass off, because I was kind of used to hanging around all sorts of gals, but my parents were pretty straight-laced, especially regarding attire that wouldn't be proper, if say, one were to wear it to church. There it is. Hazel, oblivious to my parent's wide eyes, introduced herself around and sat down with me. She asked me questions in good English, but with a pretty strong German accent.

"Are there any free concerts, around here?" asked Hazel.

"Nope, pretty much everything costs money." I said.

"Are there parks close by?"

"Not really, just boring city parks, with a bench or two," I said, "You pretty much have to drive everywhere in Southern California. Things are spread out."

"Restaurants? Shops? Shopping centers?" she asked.

"Not really anything too exciting, regarding that."

"How close is the beach?"

"We're about forty minutes away, if you take the freeway." She sighed this huge sigh.

"Do you have a bicycle I could borrow?"

"Yeah," I said. "Sure." I showed her my beach-cruiser-like bike, and gave her the key to the lock. She seemed happy and, with map in hand, was soon off. She arrived back at the house early that evening, hot, sweaty, thirsty, hungry and tired.

"You can ride and ride but there's nothing out there," she exclaimed, "just houses and streets and more houses." I realized that with no car, no budget and no resources that girl was about to have the worst vacation ever experienced in the history of vacations. She was going to be all but trapped in that house with my frowning parents. So I decided to try to help. I figured what I would do, she could do also. In other words I told her she could tag along with me.

Bobby and I were big into motorcycles. One of our favorite nights out was at the Speedway racetrack. Speedway motorcycle racing is fast-paced, oval track competitions, with unique bikes. The bikes have no brakes (riders use sliding and the throttle to slow their motorcycles) are pretty light-weight, and have four-stroke single cylinder engines. Even the smell of a race is unique because the bikes burn pure methanol. We brought Hazel to a competition somewhere around Los Angeles (I remember it was just past the big Goodyear blimp airport). We arrived and parked in a dirt lot. We broke out beers and downed them.

"Germans drink a lot of beer too," Hazel said, "only they take all day to do it. You guys take an hour." She was right, we did drink it all at once. Now buzzed, Bobby and I paid admission (we split Hazel's ticket) and made our way to the bleachers while a race was under way. Bobby and I knew the racing well, but we had not really told Hazel about the bikes, or the track, or even if you are right next to the track and the bikes come flying around, that you duck. Even though the bikes have dirt guards, a lot of dirt can still go flying around as the bikes roar by. Bobby and I ducked. After the bikes passed, we rose to find our German company covered in a myriad of small, oily, dirt particles. It was in her hair and on her low-cut halter top.

She seemed unfazed and we watched some very competitive races, until we got bored. Our next stop was close to home, a pizza place that had pool tables and dart boards. We played pool, darts and drank beer. Hazel lost at every game and often sent the pool cue-ball flying off the table, or the darts into a nearby wall.

Our next stop was Bobby's house. His parents had installed a Jacuzzi in their backyard and we jumped into suits and slid into the boiling hot water. I got bored, and, feeling a vibe from my other cohorts, excused myself, and walked the three blocks home while freezing my wet ass off.

The next morning I got the third degree from my parents.

"Where's Hazel?"

"I'm not sure." I said. "I got tired and left her over at Bobby's."

This was met with a host of deep frowns. My parents thought that Bobby was a bad influence on me, much in the same way that Bob's parents thought I was a bad influence on him. A few hours later Hazel came strolling in the door. Somehow she made it possible, in her bikini, to look like she had just come from an entire night-long orgy. At least that's what I read on my parent's faces. So Hazel's Southern California vacation, at least as far as my parent's were concerned, came to an abrupt end, after only two nights. Bobby, however, did have a girlfriend for all but one night short of two weeks. And, Hazel had a blast. We took her to the beach, to Venice, to Santa Monica and to a little town in the local mountains called Big Bear. One day, after Hazel had long departed for her homeland, I asked Bob about that first night.

"What happened?"

"We sat in the tub until we were like stewed prunes," Bob said.

"Why?"

"It's like... neither of us could make the first move."

"So did someone?" I asked.

"Her top popped off," Bobby said, "then it became sort of easy."

"So was it great?"

"Yeah, except for my arm."

"What happened to your arm?"

"After, we slept in my bed." Bob said. "She slept on my arm." Bobby, to afraid to move, let that girl use his arm for a pillow the whole night. He said it was stiff and hurt for a week. But he did have a good time. We hoped Hazel did too.

I was promoted to cook by my super-nice Jesus-loving manager (he never held a grudge) and my dishwashing replacement, Jim Copper, was as green as I had been when I started, in fact, it was his first job too. Copper was five-foot-five and all of a hundred pounds of pure skinny-ness, yet he rolled up his short sleeves as if he had 22-inch guns instead of little stick-like arms. He, like Bobby, seemed to embrace "being cool" but unlike Bob, Copper had absolutely no chance of pulling it off with anyone over the age of six, or maybe even over the age of four. He tried, though; good lord did that boy try to be cool. He had blonde hair and the longest eyelashes I had ever seen on anyone, girls included.

"Pisspants," I said and put out my hand (unlike Bob and Copper, I did not embrace coolness in anyway, and since my nickname was well earned and not going away any time soon, I embraced it).

"Copper. Some call me Copperman, like the metal," he said as we shook hands. I rolled my eyes. "Is your name really Pisspants?" Beside us Jameson let out a laugh.

"Don't call him that," Jameson said. Jameson looked absolutely huge next to Copper. "His name is Ash, I'm Jameson."

Copper soon found out about the game and pestered everybody like crazy to let him join, but nobody would tell him where the apartment was. Don said he could find it on any map—it was called: 'Bum-Fuck-Egypt'.

Of course what happened next was predictable. Copper waited the full two hours after his shift outside the pie place and followed us after we closed. It took a whole week for him to actually make it to the door of Disneyland Don's number nineteen apartment. He, like me, only had a bicycle. He would make it a few blocks before Mara's 911 or Bob's Ghia was out of sight. Undeterred, he waited at that spot the next day and followed us another one-hundred yards. He would hide behind a bush, but sure enough there he would be, in Bob's or Mara's rear-view mirror, the next night, albeit a bit farther down our route. Soon he was waiting at Don's door when we walked up.

"Go home, Copper," Jameson said. But Copper was prepared.

"I have a party to go to," Copper began, "with a lot of really cool people. But I thought I'd spend a little time with my regular friends too." He said this in a rather important voice. Mara chuckled and Don shook his head in amusement. Without missing a beat Copper continued his stage-like play; he held aloft his trump card—a bag with beer in it. Before the import-micro-everybody-has-a-brew craze, Heineken was the gold standard of beer for that time. How this skinny, underage kid got his hands on a sixer of that scrumptious skunky beer confounded all of us, and, stunned, we let him in number nineteen.

You can imagine what happened next. We let him go first and he missed miserably. Then the pros, Bob, Mara, Jameson and Don (I stood out) had at Copper with a vengeance. Our ringers, as we called them, were disappointed if they didn't hit four shots in a row. Within a half-hour Copper was falling-down drunk. He passed out. We carried him to the smelly couch.

I turned to see Mara, with a crooked smile on her face, approach with the quarter's glass full of beer. Slowly she emptied its contents onto Copper's crotch.

"Is that what happened to me?" I exclaimed. I was more excited than I had been in weeks.

"No." Don said. "We all actually heard you whizzing in your pants all the way from the table." The others laughed.

"Oh," I said, disappointed. "For a moment I thought I might be able to lose my nice new nickname."

"Nope," said Jameson.

Two hours later Copper revived himself. Without saying a word he wrapped his jacket around his waist and covered the beer spot with the knotted sleeves.

"Hadn't realized how tired I was," he said, and then, he did the unthinkable, right there in number nineteen. He went to the fridge and got his beer. Now, if one were to be familiar with the game, one would know that any beer brought to number nineteen belonged to number nineteen, and to the game, and thus, to us. Bob and I exchanged glances as Copper said his goodbyes. We followed him out the door and into the parking lot.

"Buddy," Bob began. Copper was already unchaining his bicycle. "Hold up, you seem a little buzzed."

"To be perfectly honest," Copper began, "I do feel a little foggy. Haven't eaten much today."

"You know, you can get a DUI on a bicycle," I offered. "And boy, do you smell like beer."

"Yeah..." Bob added, "There's no way we can let you get into trouble." Bob put his hand on Copper's shoulder. "You know what you should do? A quick jog around the apartments would clear a lot of that fog."

"We'll watch your bike and... stuff," said I.

Agreeing with us, Copper set out around the complex at a fast run. He really was buzzed, really trusting or else he was really stupid. Maybe he was all three. Either way we liberated him of the heady responsibility of underage beer bootlegging.

In the brown paper bag was a carrier with six beers in them. Two had been used in the game, which left four full Heinekens. I took two, and Bob took two, and they fit nicely in out big jacket pockets.

"Think we should leave him at least one?" I asked. After a pause we both said the same word at the same time.

"NAW..."

"It seems a bit light," Bob said, while holding up the bag. Glancing around, I saw the parking lot had stretches that were in disrepair. I picked up three fist-sized chunks of asphalt. Although a bit snug, they fit into the carrier with only minimal force.

"Perfect," Bob said, while bouncing the bag for weight. He neatly folded over the bag's top.

Mr. Copper came around the corner at just the right time. He was so grateful for our caring advice (he hugged us) that for a moment I felt like a shit. Then my hand gripped an ice-cold Heineken and I suddenly felt better.

With his stash in his bike's basket, Copper was off to his party chock full of celebrities, diplomats and dignitaries, and he would not arrive empty handed.

We returned to number nineteen, but not before pausing in front for some much needed refreshment.

"Did you get the beer?" asked Disneyland Don.

"Two," said Bob and I together.

"But I thought there were four left," added Mara.

"We don't know what happened to the others," Bob said just at the same time that I spoke.

"We left him two."

"Yeah, we left him two," offered Bob lamely. He elbowed me in the ribs.

"So, which is it," Jameson asked "Do you not know what happened to them or did you leave him two?"

"Both," I added. "We left him two and then we didn't know what happened to them." I said to a host of frowns.

"After... you know, we left them," offered Bob. This time I side-stepped his jab. Then, right on queue, we both burped great bellows of beer breath.

"Grosss," said Mara.

"Assholes," said Don.

"I guess they took a finder's fee," said Jameson. Mara relieved us of the remaining two beers and the game continued. Though they were considerably ahead of us, buzz-wise, because of our absence, we caught up quickly, because for some reason we became targets of their scorn, and Bob or I had to drink every time Mara, Jameson or Don made a hit.

I was so hung-over the next day that I barely paused when Copper walked in the pie place dishwashing area.

"You guys..." he said.

"What?" I said, genuinely confused.

"You dirty beer stealers," Copper said. "That was funny, though."

"Don't have any idea... hey," I said, "I was off taking a piss, while Bob was alone with your beer, did he drink one?"

"You guys..." was all he said.

Jim Copper never again joined us for the game. In a process that seemed the reverse of my first pie place experience, he related to the Jesus crowd how we drugged him and stole his possessions (he said possessions, not beer, which we felt we had a right to because of number nineteen's very clear rules). Soon he was a regular at the bible study and eventually became their most prolific recruiter of the new people. I felt our shenanigans helped save his soul, though he didn't seem very grateful. We wished him well and then never talked to him again.

When we were not at Don's or pissing as an unwelcome guest in some apartment's Jacuzzi, we spent our time at the hog farm. John wasn't really part of our group because he didn't close at the pie place, but he was a good guy and we all liked him.

Believe it or not, back in the eighties, Southern California did have large rural areas out in San Bernardino and Riverside counties, and it was there that John's dad started a hog farm in those hilly, backwoods fields. Then he got struck by a freak lightening bolt when it wasn't even raining.

The loss of his father devastated John, and he began acting pretty crazy. He fought with his mother constantly and began partying in a fashion that put us to shame, at least for a while (we would catch up).

Without his dad, the hog farm had no future. The pigs were sold off and the land just lay dormant for years. One day John approached us on a Saturday afternoon.

"Want to go somewhere freaky?" he asked. This was a kind of question we liked to be asked, with one caveat.

"Can we bring booze and smoke?" we asked together.

"Absolutely," said John.

Our conditions met, we set out toward Riverside and the hog farm. We took two freeways in two cars. It was down a long winding road and surrounded by either brown or green (depending on the time of year and how much rain we got) grassy hills. We parked on a dirt patch in front of an unmarked gate that had only a steep hill behind it.

"Where is this place?" asked Anthony.

"You have to take a trail to the other side of this hill," said John.

"So, you can't see it from the road," said Don, "cool..."

We had yet to approach the gate when a sheriff's truck pulled up and parked, with its lights on, beside us on the road.

"Boy, I hope John's dad really did own this place..." said Becky. But Becky didn't have much to fear; John and the sheriff seemed to know each other and appeared to be on friendly terms. This, however, did not mollify Jameson.

"Man, they were here within five minutes of us parking," Jameson said.

"You know why?" Mara asked, "I do, I know this area, my dad does business here." She had our full attention. "Right down this very road, at the dead end, is a bomb making place with tons of security."

The sheriff told us to 'be safe' and drove off. We all gathered around John while he fumbled with a key and the lock on the gate.

"Is there really a bomb factory just up the road?" asked Anthony.

"The place is called Jet-Labs. They make all kinds of munitions and fuel for jets, I think," said John. "We've been here for years and nothing ever happens, except that maybe the ground shakes now and then."

Climbing the hill turned out to be quite exhausting, especially for those carrying the twelve-packs of beer. However, the view at the top was worth it—we were treated to a panorama that included green hills and a long, wide valley below us. Off to our left, in the far distance, sat what looked like an industrial complex, behind us, down a steep slope, sat the abandon farm.

Standing on top of the hill, in plain sight, seemed to bother John, and he led us quickly down the other side and into a little valley. Four rows of fifty-yard long cinderblock sheds, complete with corrugated tin roofs, lay among dirt roads, abandoned farm equipment and not much else. Still, the place was fascinating—it was like exploring an old ghost town or movie set.

We walked past a rusty tractor, a stack of old boards and a pile of unused fencing. Before us were concrete troughs and rusty water cisterns.

"Yeah," said Don, "this is kind of creepy." Outside the first hog shed, just under the eaves of the roof, Don had spotted an enormous Black Widow spider. We all gathered under it, staring up. Jameson pulled a joint from his pocket and lit it with his flip-top lighter.

"Let me see that," Anthony said. He took Jameson's lighter and reached up to where the spider was.

"Don't hurt it!" yelled Becky.

"I don't want this thing around..."

Anybody can probably see the problem with standing under an Enormous Black Widow Spider and lighting a fire under its ass. What happened next was absolute pandemonium, as the spider dropped down right on top of us. Becky began shrieking and throwing off her clothes, Don ran at full speed and fell into a ditch. Jameson yelled the word Motherfucker in such a loud voice it hurt our ears, Anthony dropped the lighter and began jumping around, as I was, all while screaming, as I was, is it on me? After a few goose-bump-y moments and a couple of deep breaths, we all calmed down. Neither on us nor on the ground was the spider. It was just gone. Jameson began to laugh.

"That's the last time you ever touch my lighter, asshole," he said to Anthony. I noticed right away (as did Mara because she reached for it) that Jameson never dropped the joint. We passed it around and then we all began exploring.

As the sun sank below the hills and dusk fell onto the quiet, still, haunted gray hog pens, we made our choice. We found the least dirty building with the least leaky-looking roof. Then Jameson barked orders.

"Ash, drag in some wood for a fire," he said, "there is good stuff by the tractor. Don, bring over about six cinder blocks from the stack behind this shed. Anthony, girls, come with me." In ten minutes he had pealed back a portion of the roof, and, using cinder blocks and a sheet of corrugated tin, fashioned a decent, smoke free, fireplace. I set about breaking the dead tree limbs I had gathered, into fireplace sized pieces.

As dusk fell outside, the pen, which was littered with debris and dark shadows, began to feel weirdly sinister. The wind blew through in gusts and made the buildings creak and groan. In every crevice, we imagined, lurked spiders, snakes, scorpions and other nasty biting type things.

"Jameson, hurry, please..." begged Becky. But again she had no reason to worry—my foot-long pieces of a long dead tree limbs sprung forth bright flames as soon as Jameson touched his now 'off limits' lighter to them. Soon the pen took on an almost magical feeling as the firelight danced off the roof timbers and cinder blocks in long golden streaks. With a wide grin, Jameson began passing around still cold beers.

"Ash, get busy," he said. I sat on a wall and began rolling a joint with my stash between my knees. Don and John disappeared with our flashlight but soon reemerged with two plastic chairs and a milk crate. After a bit of dusting off, the girls had a place to sit. We boys used the crate or sat on the two-foot high cinder block walls. The fifty-yard long sheds were divided into fifteen, ten-by-eight stalls. We cleaned out our fireplace-equipped stall the best we could and all settled down around the fire.

"Bugging that Widow was such a stupid thing," Don said, and he passed the joint around Anthony and to Mara.

"Yeah, don't bug the bugs," said Becky. She took a long drink off her beer.

"Screw you idiots, give me that thing," Anthony said. The group was still passing the joint around him. He was sitting on the stall wall, with his arms draped around a dusty length of pvc pipe that ran about a foot above him. Suddenly Don reached out and grabbed both of Anthony's shoes. Don jerked them up. With no support behind him, Anthony began to fall backwards. Feeling he was losing his balance, Anthony grabbed the pipe above him in earnest. The white (and as we found out, brittle) pvc pipe cracked in two and Anthony was sent sprawling onto his back in the next stall. As an added bonus, the pipe, whose ends Anthony still grasped in each hand, had about a pint of the nastiest bilge-water I've ever seen or smelled. Every drop wound up on Anthony's shirt front. The whole process—Anthony dropping over the back of the wall, falling the two feet onto his back with a thud, his grasping, to save himself, the brittle pvc pipe, whose two broken ends then peed out dank H2O onto his chest was the funniest thing any of us had ever seen, in a long time. Everyone laughed, with the exception, of course, of Anthony himself.

It was lucky for Don that he was built like a bridge troll, because Anthony launched himself at the Midwesterner with a raw fury that was almost frightening. But Don just laughed as he warded off Anthony's blows. After much prancing about we all again settled around our fire, which was starting to die. Order was restored and everything became the same again, with the exception of Anthony's shirt front, which now sported a large dung-colored Rorschach-blot from neck to navel.

Just as our wood burned easily, it also burned fast. When the pens darkened, especially to us weed-buzzed paranoids, they became more and more creepy. I was left with long, forearm-diameter sized branches that I broke apart by stomping them with my tennis-shoe clad foot.

I screamed and everyone in the pen screamed also, because my yell startled them so.

"Help," I said.

"What's up," Jameson asked.

"Pull my knee up." I had stomped, with all my might, onto a log. What had been a branch on that log had long ago snapped off and now was nothing more than an inch-and-a-half long spike. It was on this thing that I stomped. Pinning the log with his foot, Jameson snapped my foot off the spike with a pop. The spike was covered with blood and the sole of my Chuck Taylor's now had a hole in them.

"Hope it's not deep," Becky offered.

"Raise it up," Jameson said. I lifted my injured hoof to a rail and sat that way with my foot elevated above my head, just like they tell you to.

"Take the shoe off," someone said as my foot began to pulse in deep throbbing bursts.

"No, just keep it up. Let's see what happens," John said.

"Ash," Mara approached and put her hand on my knee. "Does it hurt... oh crap," Mara hissed. I saw her concern too; in the beam of the flashlight all could see the flow of deep red inching up my sock from inside my shoe to past my ankle. The whole sock, all around my ankle, was now bloody.

"We need to take that shoe off and take a look at it..." someone said.

"No," I said, "just give me a beer and someone roll a joint, please." Unbelievably, the throbbing had all but subsided. A sharp ache replaced it, but only when I moved. I sat frozen, and guzzled my beer.

"This is some magic place," said Mara. It was then that things got even more weird. All of us could hear it. It started with a low womp-womp-womp, that kept growing louder and louder.

"Pour beer on the fire..." said Jameson. "PUT IT OUT!" He shouted, and soon we were all shrouded in a cloud of burned beer steam. The womp-womp-womp grew even louder.

Then, beams of light, impossibly bright, tore through the darkness in varying sized streaks. Every hole in the roof became a shaft of brightness, and the grounds outside, seen through the windows, were bright and white as snow. The womp-womp-womps were now so loud that none of us could hear the others speak, no matter how loud we shouted. Judging from the noise and the startlingly bright light, the chopper and its floodlight must have been only fifty feet above us.

We did the only thing we could; we crouched among the debris, leaves and critters in the shed, and didn't move or speak. Inside the pens were lit so brightly that we could see every spider web, mouse hole and rat turd. Finally, the chopper seemed to move to above the other buildings, for the light and beating of the rotator blades dimmed somewhat.

"WHAT THE FUCK, JOHN?" shouted Anthony. Jameson had moved to the door and watched as the helicopter searched other parts of the grounds.

"We gotta go," he said. Our fire was dead and it was dark. Becky's loud breathing and the choppers womp-womp-womp was all I could hear. The girl was all but panting with fright.

"He's right," Mara said, "I don't care the what, who or why, I just want to get to my car." With a last look toward the chopper, which was circling a group of tall trees a hundred yards away, Jameson turned to us.

"Let's go," and with that, one-by-one we scampered out of the pen. We crouched, commando-style and used the side of the buildings for cover.

"To those bushes," said Jameson. Soon we were huddled in thick brush a small distance from the sheds. We pushed through the thorns and branches but froze when the chopper returned. It hovered above our hiding place for a long minute before moving back to the buildings.

"GO!" Jameson shouted. We all ran. During the excitement I had forgotten about my foot. After a few steps I fell to the ground, unable to put weight on the injury. Jameson and Anthony returned from the darkness and grabbed my arms. For the half-mile back to the cars I virtually hopped, like in a three-legged race, the entire way back to our rides. Sometime during our run the chopper disappeared.

We made it to the cars and outside of the gate with almost a light-hearted sense of adventure. Some even laughed.

"See you idiots later," Mara shouted, as she and Jameson slammed the Porsche's doors and sped off. I was in John's SUV with Becky, Anthony, and Don. We were all breathing a sigh of relief as we pulled out of the dirt parking pad and onto the street.

Having an itch, I scratched the top of my head and felt what seemed like a bump. Thinking it was a scab; I grabbed the nub with my nails and pulled it through many strands of hair until it was free.

"Let me have the light," I asked. Don turned the flashlight in my direction and I held up the nub, whose legs were now moving.

"That's a fucking... tick...: Anthony said.

"Ewww," said Becky.

"I think those bushes we hid in," I began, while getting more creeped out by the minute, "may have been full of ticks..."

"Ewwwwwww..." Becky said. She kept saying that, over and over, with her fingers searching her hair, all the way home.

Word of Jameson's party had spread all around the pie place, and even people outside of our closers group were talking about it. Although I had never been to one, I was as familiar with his shindigs as I was with the Superbowl, because people talked about them so much. I was proud to be invited.

Bobby drove his Ghia and I rode shotgun. We pulled to the curb in a strange neighborhood. Bobby checked his directions again and frowned.

"This is the place..." he said. It was an area of town we had never been to before. "That's the complex, over there." Across the street was a sign that matched the name on our directions. We got out of the Ghia and began searching for apartment number 34B.

One of the first things we noticed was that we were the only white people around.

"Have you ever been to this area before?" Bob asked.

"No," said I. We passed a group of people. We said hello and since they said hello back, we asked them if they knew the location of Jameson's apartment, especially since, as we soon found, the complex was huge. They pointed us in the right direction. They were friendly but Bob and I started to feel like we were in the club scene from National Lampoon's Animal House—ours were the only blanched, ivory faces in the area.

Finally, we found the apartment. It was on the second floor. On the grounds below the apartment lay a scattering of what looked like living room and kitchen furniture—a couch, a table, chairs and an over-stuffed recliner were only part of the collection. Most of the comfy furniture was occupied by persons holding red plastic party cups. Above, the apartment's door was wide open and music blared loud enough to be heard from two buildings away.

We climbed the stairs and crept toward the door like firefighters eyeing a glowing pit at Chernobyl. There was so much energy coming from that apartment that we thought maybe there could indeed be a nuclear reactor in one of its rooms.

We peered past the door jam on a landing that literally bounced and vibrated to the beat of thundering speakers. Inside was a furniture free apartment, absolutely jammed, wall to wall, with people. They were in neat, orderly rows. Facing this crowd stood a tall man with a whistle. He resembled Jameson in height and facial features, as if he could have been his brother. Craning our necks, we watched the tall man and the crowd.

They moved in perfect sync with the band blasting from the stereo, and the man with the whistle seemed to be orchestrating it all. The crowd did moves, jumps, pivots and what appeared to be whole dance arrangements to a heavy beat. Every move, from one set of dance steps to another was directed by whistle blows and queues from the tall man and everyone in the living room, some forty or so people, moved as one, in perfect unison. Jameson, as far as we could see, was nowhere to be found.

"Maybe we should leave..." said Bob.

"Yeah, hasty retreat, that kind of thing..." I said. As we turned we came face-to-face with a pretty girl. Slightly behind her stood Jameson.

"Cheryl, these are my boys from the café," he said. Then he did what he always did, he pulled out a joint. "You guys looked as if you were about to leave," he said as he passed the joint. Bobby just stared around, all uncomfortable like, so I piped up.

"What are we supposed to do here, Jameson?" I asked. Almost as soon as I said them, I wanted the words back. But Jameson was unfazed.

"You get high, you get a drink, and then you dance, fool!" He said. So Bobby and I got high, took (strong tasting) drinks from a guy that seemed to be a bartender, downed them, asked for two more, downed them, and then we stood at the end of a row, with Bob in front of me, and then we danced. Or we tried to dance. We were much like those collapsible stick-figure toys held up by rubber bands, just flailing around as if someone were pushing the button beneath our pedestals. Jameson stood at the door and laughed.

But soon the buzz kicked in, and we started to relax. When we watched everyone around us, and concentrated on the man in front of everyone, many of the signals and moves began to make sense, and by the end of the night we thought ourselves pros at orchestrated group dancing. Everybody seemed to get a kick out of our effort, and we never felt unwelcome.

The dancing had an added bonus of detoxifying you—we exercised so much that by the end of the night, instead of being sloppily drunk, we were coherent and lucid. Bob even got the phone number of a girl there, after he turned on his newly-found sobriety-enhanced charm. It was a great party.

Back at the café, the next day, we were minor celebrities, having been the only two who showed up (and stayed) at the get-together. Jameson played up our dancing skills to the point that you'd have thought Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers had walked into 34B instead of us.

I forget whose idea it was for the road trip but everybody liked it. Bobby liked it because he had just finished work on the Ghia's engine and wanted to 'open that sucker up'. Tommy liked it because he said he had 'some acid I want to try' quote, unquote. I liked it because I liked doing anything with the group. The girls, Mara, Becky and Rhonda came along for the free ride, free booze, free joints and free laughs.

Our plan was simple. Unless there was a lingering large party or something else special going on, our closing shifts ended at about quarter to midnight. We would have the cars already packed with food, sleeping bags, a tent or two and extra clothes. We would leave directly after our Friday night shift. From the parking lot we would pile into the Karmann Ghia, Mara's Porsche and Jameson's Dodge Charger. We would take two freeways, the 5 and the 101 north, and then take Highway 1, still heading north, until we reached Big Sur. It would be 320 miles one way. Our destination was called Limekiln, which at the time (now it's a State Park) was a privately owned campground nestled in a little valley filled with California Coastal Redwood trees, which happen be the tallest trees in the world, I know, because I looked it up. It also has a nice beach and a tiny general store.

That night seemed to last forever. We kept staring at the clock. Many orders took longer to get to their tables because we were busy doing our closing chores early, while the café was still open.

Risking reprimand, we sent Becky to the front door with the key. Seven minutes before closing she locked the door and stood guard, only opening it for exiting customers.

The manager must have known something was up because he didn't do his end-of-night-walk-through-station-check, he just told us to go, adding that he trusted that we did our cleaning jobs thoroughly. At eleven-twenty we burst out of the door and raced to our cars. Bobby and I were the first out of the parking lot, followed by Mara and Rhonda and lastly by Jameson, who had refused to run to his car, much to the chagrin of Becky and Tommy. We in the Porsche and the Ghia, however, acted like it was the start of the Great Race.

In an hour we were on the 101, leaving Los Angeles and on our way to Santa Barbara. Mara had already passed us, at about the Conejo Grade. After Santa Barbara the 101 had long open stretches of road between small cities like Buellton and Arroyo Grande, and this was where Bobby turned to me.

"Watch this," he said. He floored the Ghia. As I mentioned earlier, he had modified the engine with bored-out pistons and a carburetor that had a barrel for each cylinder, or something like that. We took off, roaring down the dark highway at 100 mph, with the Ghia's engine barely passed 3500 rpms. Bobby held the car steady at that speed for some time and then began to drive even faster. At 120 the Ghia was purring at about 4500 rpms. Behind us were no headlights and in front a pair of Porsche tail lights came into view.

We passed Mara and soon even her headlights were out of view behind us. We drove for about forty or so minutes. Then Bob slowed and pulled to the side of the 101, somewhere around the town of Santa Maria.

"Your turn," he said. We switched seats. I put the Ghia in first (my dad had taught me on his Mustang how to drive a stick) and began to pull into the lane when Mara's Porsche flew by. "Catch them or you're a dead man," Bobby said. I had the car up to 110 when we caught and again passed Mara. She saw me in the driver's seat. I was just able to catch her grin as we pulled away. At 110 the Ghia's steering was so tight that the slightest movement of the wheel made the car all but swerve. I remember holding the wheel in a sweaty death-grip that made my hands hurt. Around the town of Pismo Beach we pulled over and switched back to me riding shotgun. Mara again passed us.

At San Luis Obispo Bobby and I stopped at a Shell station to gas up and use the bathroom. From there we caught Highway 1 going north toward Morro Bay and its big weird rock that sits out there in the ocean. I remember it being about two or two-thirty in the morning. After Morro Bay we passed Cayucos and then the pretty town of Cambria. Soon we were speeding our way toward Hearst's Castle and San Simeon. There the highway was a curvy two-lane road that snaked through bright green hilly grasslands and huge cattle ranches that were for the most part still owned by the Hearsts' or their corporation.

Part of our plan was to stop along the way and just sleep a few hours in our cars. Bobby had a spot off the highway on a farm road that the others knew about. Soon headlights slipped in behind us, followed forty minutes later by a third set. The spot had a white fence and a locked gate about a quarter-mile further up the road. I think it was a little before four in the morning by the time everyone arrived. We smoked a joint, talked a while and then returned to our cars. We buried ourselves into our jackets and slept, best we could, in our seats.

It was six-thirty when I awoke, and while dawn had come the sun had yet to crest the hills so it was still cold and dewy. On the fence next to me was a big pair of eyes. They stared. I stared back for a very long moment. When Bobby stirred the owl flew off. I had never seen a Great Horned Owl before, and I never thought I'd see one just a few feet away. I thought maybe I looked like a giant mouse to him. I found its feather-tuft horns and its piercing yellow eyes fascinating but I kept the encounter to myself, thinking that the others would never believe my tale of a close encounter with wildlife. For breakfast I had a bag of Fritos and a can of soda and a few bites of beef jerky.

After San Simeon, California State Route 1, also known as Highway 1, begins winding its way up the hills and toward a ninety-mile stretch that Spanish speaking people used to call "el país grande del sur" or, roughly translated, the great country of the south, or, as it's referred to now, Big Sur. Big Sur has teaming cliffs and spectacular views of the Pacific Ocean. It has waterfalls, beaches, small bedroom communities and artsy-types of people. At the southern part of Big Sur was our destination, Limekiln Campground.

Limekiln was named after a trio of kilns that early settlers used to cure lime. Ships then came and transported the lime to cities up the coast. But what attracted us to Limekiln were its trails. The Kiln and Hare trails were something I always imagined the paths around Elrond's cottages in Rivendell, from J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, would look like. The floor was carpeted with green fern and clover and pillars of redwoods rose up above you almost to a vanishing point. We considered Limekiln a magical place. That's why we went there to drink, smoke weed and take acid, of course.

Bobby and I were the first to arrive, I think at about nine in the morning; because we stopped a few times to hike and to just enjoy the view. We arranged two campsites deep in the redwoods (they also had beach spots) and drove to our sites.

I set up a tent, and threw in my sleeping bag and a small duffel with a change of clothes. Jameson, Tommy and Becky arrived next. Becky set up a small pink tent "for one" she said. Tommy and Jameson said they would sleep either out in the open or in the Charger. Mara and Rhonda arrived last. We discovered that they had stopped in Gorda and found a small café for breakfast. That they didn't bring any to-go food back with them brought howls of protest from the crowd.

"We figured you'd all be so stuffed from the big box of apple pies Ash brought," was Mara's retort.

"Well, Ash?" Jameson asked.

"Didn't bring the old box-o-pies, but I did bring this," I said as I held up a hand-rolled cigarette thingy. Next to our camp was a bubbling stream that lapped over rocks and fallen trees. A gray bird, called an American Dipper, I think, jumped from rock to rock while searching for food. It would actually dive into the water and then pop up like a cork, only to dive again. To get away from the other campers we walked to a ravine by the stream and did our thing. Then we took the Kiln trail to Falls trail and then on to the campground's best attraction, their 80-foot-tall waterfall.

The base of the waterfall was surrounded by rocks that formed a pool. Jameson and Tommy immediately removed their shirts and shoes and jumped into the shallow water. Bobby and I followed. Becky put one foot into the water and shrieked.

"Come-on girls," Tommy said, "It's just like a Jacuzzi." We boys sat in a circle while the waterfall rained down on us.

"Yeah, just like a Jacuzzi—in the fucking artic," said Jameson.

"I feel like I'm at the fat guy's apartments," said Bob, "only it's really, really cold instead of cozy and warm.

"Passsss...." said Mara as she sampled the water with her foot. Instead the girls sat on the larger rocks and dipped a toe in the pool now and then. Even so the mist from the falls soaked them. Freezing and damp, we hiked back to our campsite where everyone put on sweaters or jackets.

"Ash," Tommy began, he had the Charger's doors open and had pulled out a large blue cooler from the back seat. "This is how it's done... ta-da!" he said. The cooler was filled to the top with ice, beer, hot dogs, sodas, sausages, and a plastic bag of burgers that looked suspiciously like those we served at the café. He also had a plastic tub filled with hot dog and hamburger buns, condiments, chips, cups, utensils and paper plates. It looked like we had everything to make a feast fit for a king, or at least for a sloppy king, because nobody remembered napkins or paper towels.

"Do we have barbeque briquettes?" Becky asked.

"We have something better," said Jameson. He opened the Charger's trunk and we found it was full of wood. "Real mesquite. Unlike that stuff in the hog pens, this stuff burns slow and hot, and it will make everything tasty-smoky." He also had a grate for grilling.

We piled the wood into our tub-style fire-pit and lit it. Soon our site, in a thick of redwoods, clover and ferns, clouded up with a sweet musky smoke smelling of fat drippings.

Bobby passed around beers and bags of chips. Someone opened a bottle of tequila. High over head the sun began to break through the thick canopy, as it found an open space above us, and both the booze and the warm rays stole away the chill of the falls.

We had burgers and hot dogs and all the trimmings. I looked down and found I was covered with mustard and ketchup.

"Ash, don't mind us," Mara said, "Just eat up like a ravenous stray dog." My burger had too much sauce on it and was squishing apart. My hands needed washing.

"Do we have any water?" I asked. Jameson pointed to a pipe, sticking out between the campsites, with a faucet on top. I came back with clean hands and a big wet spot on my now multi-colored shirt.

After another long hike we returned to our camp at about four in the afternoon.

"Do you think we could try a game on the picnic table?" Rhonda asked. Of all of us she had played the game the least, because usually her mom drove her to and from work. What happened next was something straight out of the Keystone Cops.

Instead of a nice bouncy Formica surface, we had a rust-colored wooden picnic table that had thick paint chips missing from it. Instead of a little glass we had a tall, red, plastic tumbler-style cup. Instead of a towel we had Bobby's bandana. We decided to forgo the ashtray.

Mostly the quarter careened off the table and then we spent ten minutes searching for it in the leaf litter of the redwoods, which drop inches and inches of the stuff year-round. I think only Jameson and Mara ever made a shot—mostly all of us drank because we picked up the bandana or couldn't find the quarter. By the end of an hour my hands were dark with grime from the forest floor, and we had lost about two bucks in coins. The soil around the redwoods is damp and rich and loose and similar in appearance to used coffee grinds.

We gave up on our game and decided to just sit around the fire. The sun had gone behind the hills and it became very chilly again, so the warmth of the flames drew us like moths.

"Lookee what I gots," said Tommy. I had never seen LSD before. He held aloft what looked like only a perforated sheet of paper stamped with different colored symbols on it—a happy face, a dog, and different cartoons. "Strictly... use at your own risk," Tom said, "Stick out your hand if you want a tab." Every hand was placed before Tommy, including mine.

"Hold up," Jameson said, "First—you ever try this shit, Ash?" I shook my head no. "Then pass. Also we need a shotgun buddy, clean of this stuff in case the shit gets weird." This caused a lot of discussion—I figured out later that Big Sur's freakiness and Tommy's acid was why everybody came along in the first place. Jameson's objection was solved pretty easily. Everybody just popped the little paper tabs into their mouths. All but Jameson.

"Looks like you're our shotgun," laughed Mara.

"The fucking hell I am," Jameson said. He stretched out the word hell as he said it, and then flicked the paper tab into his mouth. "Don't blame me if things get fucked up—we could have drawn straws or something."

"It's the freaking HAMBURGLAR, only in a natty fur coat, mannnn..." Bobby's voice was high-pitched and cracking. Before us stood... the creature.

"It's an alien!" shrieked Becky "In a burglar's mask. It came from space to burgle us!"

"I'm telling you, IT'S THE FREAKING HAMBURGLAR!" said Bob again.

"HIDE YOUR STUFF!" shouted Rhonda.

"That not the fucking Hamburglar..." Jameson said. He rose and peered into the darkness. Just barely illuminated by our fire was the creature. "I think that's a raccoon!"

"It is a raccoon, you idiots," said Mara. She also rose. She took a step toward the creature.

"STAY AWAY FROM IT!" Becky shouted. But Mara only frowned. She reached into a bag and tossed some bouncing white bubbles at the creature.

"Yup... it's a raccoon... and... he likes marshmallows." Mara said.

She began throwing marshmallows all around. To me they looked like glowing white globes that floated in the air for an impossibly long time. They even left a trail, just like a comet does.

"Oh, wowww," I said while staring at the freaky globes that began to rain down on us like fireworks.

"Mara, stop that!" Jameson said. Mara had thrown the entire bag of marshmallows high into the air. Soon there were three or four creatures around us.

"They're all around," Tommy said in a shaky voice, "THEY'RE-EVERY-FUCKING-WHERE!"

Bobby sat next to me. I turned to him—and that motion seemed to take a tremendous effort—I felt like a robot that needed grease, or like the Tinman that needed oil. Nevertheless I turned, with my hands in front of me, toward him. He was breathing in great gasps, huffing air in, then panting it back out again. Using my new-found robotic, mechanical moving skills, I ordered my central processing unit to move my torso from my right, all the way in the other direction. Soon I was facing Tommy, who sat on my left. Tommy was hugging his shoulders, like he was wearing an invisible straight jacket, and rocking back and forth, while laughing. He looked, literally, like a mental patient. I saw this myself, with my mechanical robot eyes. Becky was slowly stretching her arms out, and then flashing her fingers open, and yelling "Boo!" at the water spigot next to her. Mara was still throwing the white orbs at the Hamburglars which seemed to prefer to stay just out of our firelight. Rhonda was placing logs into the fire in super-slow-motion. Often she would snap her hand away from the fire, as if it had lingered too long over the heat. Then she would grab another log and repeat the process. Soon we had a tremendous blaze before us.

"I think we got enough wood in there, Rhonny." Mara said. She was now throwing not-so-white dirt-covered orbs, right at the Hamburglars. She hit one flat on the forehead, which made Jameson howl with laughter. She began to say 'Boo!' to the Hamburglar before her. It nibbled on an orb, which it held in tiny claw-like hands, unfazed.

The next thing I remember was staring in the darkness and feeling a great sense of relief. It was like as if I were an ecosystem, complete with my own waterfall.

"Jameson," Mara said, "Ash is over there taking a piss in the middle of the road, and the other campers are staring."

Then I remembered sitting in the dark, watching tiny, red, sparkling elves dance in a pit, with vague shapes around me. I realized that I was just staring at the remaining embers of our dead fire. I figured I had run out of fuel or grease, because my robot body would not move. Then I realized that with our fire all but out, I was absolutely, positively, freezing. I was hugging myself tightly, much like Tommy had been, earlier. I remember making it to my tent, and, with a Herculean effort, sliding my frozen robot body into my sleeping bag.

I awoke to a warming tent whose nylon walls were beginning to brighten before the sun's rays. I crawled out of my abode and stretched. I was greeted by intense, glaring looks from the other campers at the next campsite. None of my companions were around.

I was aghast to find that the morning was already old; it was after eleven in the morning. At the spigot I washed, best I could, my face and hands with icy water. On the way to the restrooms I passed many other campers that either looked away at my gaze or else just shook their heads as I passed.

Back at our camp, still all alone, I began a search for nourishment. What I really wanted was something hot—hot chocolate, hot tea, or even hot coffee—but I knew we had brought nothing of the sort and our fire was completely dead. I knew nobody had brought any kind of stove.

Oddly enough, all I found was a can of soda, and that was lying in the dirt beside Becky's tent. It was covered with tiny, grimy, greasy hand-prints, but it was still cold, probably because it had lain in the shadows all morning. Unfazed, I took it to the stream and washed it off, and for breakfast, alone and slightly bewildered, as morning turned into afternoon, I enjoyed a cola.

Our empty camp looked much like it had the day before, but now our cooler and food tub sat on our picnic table. Both were empty, except for a couple of dirty plates and dusty plastic cups.

"Hey, sunshine," Mara said. She was wearing Bobby's bandana over her blonde hair, but still looked fabulous. She smiled her crooked smile at me.

"Hi, where is everybody?" I asked.

"They're a ways behind me, but coming," said Mara. "Start packing up. It would probably be best to get out of here before they throw us out."

In the end I found out that raccoons had raided and eaten everything that was left in our cooler and dry-food tub (except for a lone soda) and that the others had decided on a morning hike and left me behind because apparently I was 'snoring up a storm' and they didn't have the heart to wake me.

I also found out that the other campers found my robot acting, road-pissing activities offensive, and that they also faced raids from raccoons that somehow had been lured to our campground in droves, and that they apparently did not fancy the antics of a paranoid Space-Alien hunting Becky, nor did they appreciate Tommy's hysterical laughter or Bobby's hyperventilating or Rhonda's pyrotechnics. Stick-in-the-muds, I decided, every one of them.

We were packed and in the cars driving away before fifteen minutes had passed. We just drove by the kiosk without checking out—nobody wanted to hear anything anybody working in the campground had to say, anyway.

Instead of turning left on Highway 1, and heading south, ahead of us Jameson and Mara turned right. Bobby followed.

"Where are we going?" I asked. It was noon on Sunday, and we had a six-hour drive home ahead of us, and we were going the wrong direction.

"Mara said there is some kind of festival thing in the city of Big Sur," Bob said. "They want to check it out. She said they'll have lots of food, and since all of us are starving, that's where we're going."

The festival was being held down a narrow lane, next to a bridge. At the bottom of the path sat six or so quaint cottages. Around these were booths, stands and tables selling food, crafts and local art. Off to one side two guys stood playing a flute and a guitar. The whole area had a homey, warm kind of feeling, and the people, not knowing our Big-Sur-Antics-of-the-Recent-Past, were friendly.

We filled up with a hot beverage they called Chai Tea that tasted like sweet condensed milk and cloves. The drinks were followed by home-baked cookies. We found a table and feasted on our sweets and hot drinks. I was wearing an old field-jacket I had stolen from my father (it had Patrick stenciled above the pocket) and jeans. Among the cool shadows of that little valley, the hot tea and my thick clothes warmed me through and through.

We talked to a few locals, mostly about the best trails around the nearby Ventana Wilderness, and Mara bought a small watercolor painting of a Santa Lucia Fir tree beside a rocky stream. I reminded her that the Santa Lucia Fir is the scarcest fir in the world and she reminded me that not everyone wanted to know everything about every tree. She just liked the painting, she said.

After that we headed south. We stopped in a little town called Arroyo Grande and picked up tacos at about three in the afternoon. Eventually Bobby deposited me in front of my parent's house at around seven-forty-five (there was a lot of Sunday traffic through Los Angeles) in the evening.

"How was your weekend?" my mom asked as I walked by.

"Fine," I said. I was completely and utterly exhausted and I just went to my room, closed the door, and fell into my bed, with my clothes on and all.

At the same time my relationships within the group grew, my relationships within my family began to deteriorate. First I stopped talking to them. I couldn't very well converse about the drinking, drugs or the game to any of them, nor was I about to mention, to my mom, or anyone else, that somewhere along the line her boy had lost his virginity. But more about that later.

My parents had also begun asking the wrong sort of questions. What was I doing, who was I hanging out with, why my nights were so late and how come my grades were slipping so much at the college I was attending. By either stone-walling or lying, I evaded most of their questions, only to find that my evasiveness made them more curious than ever. Once my mom found a joint in my room and confronted me about it.

"Ash, what the heck is this?" she asked, holding up the joint.

"It's just a joke." I said. "It's not real. We were just fooling around, rolling dry weeds into... like fake... um... weed cigarettes."

Believe it or not, that answer worked, at least for a short time. But soon my mom began sniffing my breath and remarking that I smelled like smoke and sometimes beer. She mentioned that my eyes were often red. I brought my concerns to the group and found that there was an answer for this. Then, my mom came across that answer and, instead of things getting better, things got worse.

"Why do you need Visine and Tic–Tacs?" she asked in a sort of way that the Gestapo might ask how it came to be that you spoke fluent Hebrew.

"No reason," I said. Rather than face their questions I began to withdraw from them. I stopped eating meals with my parents and my sister. It was like we were a family of three instead of four. I disabled the outside knob from the door on my room, so that it would come off in your hand instead of opening the door (one needed a pocket knife, or a screw driver, to open it if it were closed) to insure some privacy. I kept my group friends away, and brought only my straight friends around (when I could stand the boredom).

My dad ignored this behavior, saying only 'don't piss off your mother'. My sister knew what was going on, for she had friends that knew my group friends. Still, she didn't care. She had her own plan for dealing with my parents—one I knew was also down a not-too-long a road for me—moving out.

I began trying to mask my comings and goings. If I looked 'spruced up' as they say, my mom would hover around me and ask questions. So, often I would wear a t-shirt and holey sweats and take what looked like a load of laundry to the garage. But it wouldn't be dirty clothes, it would be my party shirt and pants. I would change in the garage and run out to a waiting car. I also made sure my group friends never came to the door or honked as they drove by; I knew all their cars so well I could tell by the sound of them that they were near. If I heard a Ghia, Charger or Porsche, I would feign exhaustion, stretching and saying how tired I was, and tell my mom I was calling it a night, only to crawl out of my window and again, run to a waiting car.

One night an incident happened that confirmed my lifestyle once and for all. It started in the garage, while my mom was doing laundry. It was about six o'clock and I tried to slip out of the house by going through the garage in my party-best, only to run smack into my mother.

"Where do you think you're going?" she asked. Before I could answer, a bug, also know as a waterbug or a giant roach, scurried from beneath the now vibrating washer and tried to reach sanctuary under a cardboard box nearby. Quick as lightening, I stomped at it (and missed). The problem was that I had begun carrying weed on me at all times, and this night was no exception. However, too many cops, and even my mom, sometimes, pinched my pockets in a rude search of my person. So I kept my weed in my sock. As you probably have already guessed, trying to stomp that bug dislodged my stash. There it lay, before us, in unmistakable baggie form, on the garage floor, between a stunned mother and her rather horrified kid. For a second, neither of us moved. Then, quick as lightening, more Keystone-Kops-like stuff, ensued. With an audible clunk, our head's bounced off each other. Both of us had bent down, at the same time, to grab my stash. Our heads bumped. Luckily, I was faster and was able to swipe the bag right out from under my mom's fingertips. Weed in hand, I faked left and then rolled right, at full speed, out the side garage door and to freedom—the dusky night. In the distance I heard a scream.

"GET BACK HERE YOUNG MAN..."

That pretty much was the beginning of the end of my license to live under my parent's roof. I hadn't realized it at the time but from then on my mom and dad were grooming me for life as an independent, free citizen, unfettered by overlords.

They began collecting rent, which they placed into an account that they would later give to me, and they had me open a checking account at that same bank. My dad bequeathed me his manual transmission 1966 Ford Mustang (it was offered to my sister but she couldn't drive a stick) and then they began leaving newspapers on my bed. Circled in red ink were cheap apartment and roommate wanted ads. Eventually, I got the message, but not for a good year, and that was about the time I met Christy.

Chapter 3

My friend Jimmy began dating the proverbial girl next door. Jimmy wasn't part of the pie place group; he was just a guy I knew that always had weed. That was because Jimmy knew Bryce, and eventually I knew Bryce, but more about Bryce later.

It was Jimmy's girlfriend, Christy, that this story is about. I didn't know much about Christy and Jim didn't really talk about her. My first memories of the girl began when I would drop by Jimmy's house to pick him up. Jimmy had weed but no car, so if I had no weed, then my new car, the 1966 Ford, came in handy. He would jump into the passenger seat and Christy would run up to see him off. She would give him a kiss, all girlfriend-boyfriend like, through the Mustang's window. To do this she would have to stoop over. What I noticed, was that when she did this, without exception, her v-neck top would kind of hang down and I could see everything, the Golden Globes and all. As we drove away, after having made this presentation, I could swear she would give me the look.

I learned about sex in a rather odd way. I guess I was about eleven years old. One day I was in the bathroom and I came across an unopened box. It had a colorful picture of a woman riding a horse or frolicking at the beach or something like that, on it. I had never come across that box before that fateful day. I did not know what was in it. But I did know that I needed to get my share of anything that came in a box that came from the grocery store. If we bought a box of doughnuts, I wanted my share. The same went for snacks, cereal, crackers, cookies and anything else that could be packaged in cardboard (or plastic, for that matter). That my overlords were hiding this new thing in the bathroom made it even more special, I thought. So I grabbed the box, and roamed the house, in search for my mom and a damn good explanation of just why I was being deprived of my fair share of beach-frolicking, horse-riding, goodness.

Finally, I found her sewing in the living room. I thrust the box, that said something about 'feminine hi-jinks napkins' or something like that on the label, before me and demanded to know just what was in it and just why was I not told about it. I vividly remember her reaction—it was one of quiet hesitation. She looked confused for a moment and then took the box from me.

"I'll have your father see you after he comes home from work," she said. She shooed me away and told me to go outside and play. I remember thinking that it would be a lot easier to just give me my fair share of said box and not bother my dad, but it didn't seem like I had much to say about the matter. I figured, though, that whatever was in that box was sure special.

I took my G.I. Joe action figure (also known as a doll) out to the back yard, where I amused myself by burying the plastic guy two feet deep in a planter. I had all but forgotten about the box when my dad approached me. He was unusually nice. He put his hand around my shoulder and gave me a hug.

"Let's you and I have a talk, son." Was what he said. He took me to his study (just a third, unused bedroom) and sat me down. He had some books before him. What followed was the most bewildering, most confusing, weird discussion I had ever had in my life. We looked at pictures of the statue of David. We looked at illustrations of uteruses and fallopian tubes and other yucky stuff. After a suffocating long period of discussion, my dad finally asked if I understood it all. I didn't understand a single thing about our 'talk', but I wanted to get the hell out of there so I said I did. Soon I was back in the back yard, un-burying my life-like-hair G.I. Joe.

It was then that everything became perfectly clear. I realized, after giving it some cold, hard, calculating thought, that whatever was in that box was so special, so wondrous, so super-über fantastic that my parents were willing to use torture to keep me from my fair share. Bringing up all that biology stuff, I thought, as I dusted off my G.I. Joe, was like bringing thermonuclear warheads to a Calvary battle.

I knew I would never get my fair share of what was in that box. I must admit, I mused while having my G.I. Joe commit suicide by jumping off a BBQ, that my parents had got the best of me with their brilliant strategy of confuse-the-kid with gross biology stuff. And, I knew I would never, ever, ever, ask about that box, again.

I began anticipating Christy's boob-show-the-look presentation, sometimes even going out of my way to pick up Jimmy even when we had nothing to do. One day I called Jimmy's number only to have Christy pick up the phone.

"Hey Christy, is Jimmy there?" I asked in my innocent-virgin-voice.

"He's in the garage," Christy said, "helping his dad. But he'll be coming over to my house later. Let me give you my number," she said in a not-so-innocent-non-virgin-like voice.

Strangely enough, when I called later that evening, Jimmy had not joined Christy at her house.

"Hi Christy, is Jimmy there?" I asked. I was slightly nervous, for some reason, which was strange because I had never been nervous about talking to Jimmy before.

"Oh, he's gone off with his dad," she said. "Whatever he was doing in the garage, well... they had to go somewhere. But I'm here. How are you doing, Ash? Nice to talk to you."

"Same here, did Jimmy say when he would be back?"

"I'm not sure what Jimmy's up to," she said, "I'm just laying here in my bed, bored stiff." Christy said. "Hey, are you bored too?" she added, purely as an innocent afterthought.

"Sort of..."

"Come pick me up in your Mustang car!" Christy said. An unmistakable excitement resonated in her voice.

Christy lived just two houses down from Jim. After an awkward moment of silence, she caught on. "Oh, maybe you shouldn't drive down here, maybe I could walk up to Mickey's Pizza and you could pick me up there?"

Our rendezvous at the pizza place went smoothly, and soon it was Christy riding shotgun next to me, instead of my very good, faithful friend, and Christy's next door neighbor and boyfriend, Jimmy.

What happened next is sort of a blur. I just remember we were under the concealing branches of a large Weeping Willow (Genus: Salix) tree (which are common in the temperate areas of the Northern Hemisphere), in a nearby park, and Christy had only one leg of her pants on.

I pushed. Everything exploded. I wasn't embarrassed, I was relieved.

"Man, I thought that would never happen," I blurted out.

"Were you a virgin?" Christy asked. Jimmy really never talked about Christy, except for maybe this one thing: she had a big mouth, and talked to everybody about everything.

"Of course not," I said in my most convincing voice, "I meant that I thought it would never happen with you." She smiled broadly and we hugged. The great thing about being a virgin is how much gas you still have in your never-been-used tank. In a space of about an hour, we did it four more times. With a stroke of incredible luck, Christy just happened to have a full box of condoms with her, that she had bought for her very slutty friend, she said, so we were safe the whole time.

Later we were just staring up into the willow tree, sort of snuggling like.

"What was that you said," I asked, "right at the beginning of this..."

"...boy, was that fast?" she asked.

"No, before we started anything, you said something about not worrying."

"Oh, about my age," she said.

"Yeah, that was it," I rose up on one elbow. "What did you mean when you said, don't worry about my age?"

"I'm sixteen, almost sixteen and a half." Right about here is where in the movies one would do what they call a spit-take. Even though I was only nineteen myself, sixteen seemed pretty young for doing the things we had been doing. Still, we used protection and, well, Jim did tell me a few other things about Christy, like that she had a ravenous appetite, and not just for food.

I started seeing Christy regularly. I tried not to, her being my buddy's girl and all. Honestly, I broke up with her almost every day. Then I would go to that community college, where all the girls were gorgeous, if not overly smart, and I'd start thinking about how Christy had this insatiable appetite for stuff other than food and all and before I'd know it, I'd be on the phone with her.

"Hi Christy," I said.

"Ash!" she exclaimed.

"Um, want to go to the park or something?" I asked.

"Okayyy..." she said. She said the word okay drawn out and with a giggle.

"Meet me at Mickey's." I said, with keys in hand and condoms in pocket.

The park stopped being such an attractive spot when one day a woman walking her sniffing, wanting to pee in a tree, dog, went and created a strange version of coitus interruptus, for Christy and I.

We tried it in the Mustang but the stick shift and tiny back seat literally provided substantial obstacles. Then, I thought of Bobby. He did, after all, live in his own trailer, but I knew I would need to have a talk with him before we dropped by.

"Bobby, you remember Jimmy, right?" I asked.

"Yeah, that dope who smokes all kinds of weed and hooks-up with that idiot-sixteen-year-old."

"Christy." I said.

"Yeah, that's right," Bob said. "What about him?"

"Well, I'm sort of seeing that idiot-sixteen-year-old of his, on the sly."

"You serious?" Bob asked. "That's priceless, just priceless, and Jimmy has no clue?"

"None."

"You doing her?"

"Yeah."

"Son-of-a-bitch!" Bobby exclaimed. "Our little horndog is all grown up. Wait till I tell Mara..."

"Thanks it..." I interrupted. "That's what I want to talk about. PLEASE don't mention this to the group. I want it to just be my business. Please, Bobby."

"Sure, whatever, dude." Bob said.

"And, oh, yeah," I said, "can I borrow your trailer once in a while?"

The moment I heard about the cruise I began formulating my plan. My parents had reserved a room on an ocean liner that would travel from Fort Lauderdale to San Diego via the Panama Canal. The trip would take two weeks and I was not invited, which meant I would have the whole house to myself for fourteen days.

It would be me, the house, and the cars in the driveway. I mention the cars not because of my dad's pickup truck, but because of the thing that sat next to it. My mom had bought her 'dream car' just one year before. It had spoilers, a t-top, leather seats and a 305 cubic-inch engine under a fiberglass body. I liked everything about her car, with just one exception: the color. Chevrolet called the color Dark Claret, which seemed to be a fancy name for burgundy. It looked like my mom's Corvette was the color of dark red-purple wine. Nonetheless, I was determined to carry out my devious plot. I began by telling everyone at the pie place that I had come into some money (poor Grandma died) and that I was going to buy a great car. After that it was a simple matter of execution.

My dad was a creature of habit. After a long day at work, and a long commute from Los Angeles to Orange County, he always returned home exhausted. He had an hour between his arrival at the house and his dinner. He spent that time with a newspaper while nestled deep into an old but comfy reclining chair that I called the dad-o-lounger. Less than one page of the paper would be read before he was fast asleep. Soon, he was snoring.

After a quick sweep of the area I determined that we were alone. I sat on the floor beside the dad-o-lounger, ostensibly to watch T.V. which had the volume turned down low. I crept closer. He always kept his keys in his right pants pocket. Craning my neck, I peered into his pocket and saw something shiny. Using skills I had picked up by playing the Hasbro Game Operation, I pinched at the metal object with two fingers. As if my plan was meant to be, his entire ring of keys slid noiselessly out of his pocket and into my now tightly clutched hand.

I raced out of the door and to my bicycle. With breakneck speed I rode to a department store called Montgomery Ward. It wasn't the department store I was interested in, but a little hut that sat in the middle of the store's parking lot. My biggest fear was that the hut would be busy and I would run out of time. But my fears were unfounded; the hut had no customers. The guy in the hut took his time copying my dad's set of the Corvette's keys and after what seemed like an eternity (and three bucks) I was speeding my way back to the house. I crept through the door and got goose bumps when I heard the noise I had been hoping to hear the whole time I was away. Snoooore. I sat beside the dad-o-lounger. I placed the keys soundlessly on the floor directly below my father's right pocket and settled in to watch a Hogan's Heroes episode I had seen at least ten times before. Soon my dad rose and stretched.

"Are those your keys?" I asked while pointing to the floor.

"Thanks kid." Was all he said. A two-week vacation from my parents, a whole house to myself and a 1980 purple Corvette now lay ahead of me, just waiting to be exploited. I swear I walked around with a grin on my face for two solid months. Then, of course, just when everything seemed to be going so right, things went terribly wrong.

"We'll park your car in the garage and park my truck in the driveway," my dad said to my mom one day. My heart skipped a beat; I had copied only my mom's car keys. With my father's truck blocking the garage and my mom's car in it, the best I could do with my stolen set of keys was to asphyxiate myself in the garage, in a running Corvette, that I would be able to drive exactly four inches, toward the washer and dryer. My smile disappeared. Then, I got an idea. By the time my dad arrived in the garage to inspect his would-be Corvette sanctuary, I had my Husqvarna motorcycle in pieces spread all over the garage floor.

"Maintenance," I said to my dad. The bike's seat sat by the workbench, the gas tank by boxes I had pushed more to the center of the garage, and the Husky's front tire lay directly in the middle of the floor. I had the bike's chain in my hands. I had them totally covered in grease. With my big black oily mitts, I saluted my father. My dad just rolled his eyes.

In the end I waved goodbye to them as they boarded an airport shuttle, just feet from BOTH their autos, which sat, side by side, OUTSIDE the garage. My incredibly big grin returned. It would remain for fourteen days.

They weren't gone five minutes before I sprang into action. First, I washed and waxed the Corvette. Then I put on the car a front-end bra that my mom had bought but never bothered to install. I thought it made the Vette look extra sporty. Then I took the t-top panels off and stored them in the garage. After that I dropped by the home of every pie place friend I had. Remember, I told every one of my friends that I was buying a new car. They were heartily impressed. Now outside the pie place sat a Porsche, a souped up Charger, a hot Camero and a super-shiny purple Corvette. The group made sure we all parked together, in the back of the lot.

We drove the car to Hollywood, Beverly Hills and Brentwood. We took it to Malibu, Westwood and cruised Mulholland and Rodeo Drives. We had a big scare during our first gas stop, when I opened the tank door only to find a locking gas cap sealing off the tank (my mom was worried someone 'me' was stealing her gas). Good thing my mom was kind of thrifty; a locker key I carried opened the thing right up. I swear that lock could have been picked by a monkey with a stick.

Soon the fourteen day stretch was all but behind me and I began telling everyone that I really didn't like the car and was selling it so that I could buy a Porsche like Mara's. While I saved up, I told them, I would still drive my beat-up '66 Stang.

The day came when my parents would return home. I had time; their flight was to arrive at noon, after a brief moment in the air commuting from San Diego to LAX, they would still have a forty-minute ride home. Because of checked bags and possible traffic I guessed their ETA would be about one-thirty or two in the afternoon. The first thing I did was park the Corvette in the same spot where I found it, right next to my dad's truck. Then I squished down in the seat and pretended to be a five-foot-tall woman. I re-adjusted all the mirrors and pulled the seat forward. I felt relatively sure that my mom hadn't checked the mileage; she had all but tired of the car in a single year. I removed the bra and put the t-top panels back on. Then I stood before the cars and surveyed my work. I was immediately struck by something—my dad's truck had a thick coating of dust from its two week layoff, but the Corvette was shiny, waxed and new looking. I knew that there would be no more suspicious thing in the world than me, out of the blue, unbidden and unpaid, doing something nice for my mom. Were she to see her car as it was I feel she would have hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency to investigate.

Desperate, I struck on an idea that I figured might work. I went into the house and opened the closet in the hall. Out came the vacuum cleaner. I removed the bag. Were you to be a neighbor of ours that Sunday afternoon you may have seen a young man walking around a shiny Corvette, slapping the bottom of a half-full paper vacuum cleaner dust bag, to create a grit storm. After a lot of coughing and dust settling, I once again studied my work. It had turned out beautifully, with one caveat: golf ball-sized carpet bunnies now lay on the hood and roof of the car. I picked them off carefully, and once again reviewed my work. The bra was gone, the mirrors were readjusted, the panels were back on and the unused-for-two-weeks Corvette had a thick coating of dust on it. It was tightly locked. It had about the same amount of gas in it as it had two weeks prior. Everything couldn't have been more perfect if I had had a Hollywood Special Effects man at my disposal.

The last thing was the keys. As I mentioned before, I knew my mom had begun searching my room. A set of familiar looking car keys would cause instant and prolonged curiosity, that I knew would be my downfall, as they were trying diligently to kick me out at this time. After some careful deliberation, I decided on a hiding spot. My parents had long ago bequeathed me a large (almost coffin sized) stereo console with fake wood molding and built-in speakers. The thing weighed about a hundred pounds. Under its heavy lid was a tape deck, a turntable and a radio. I pried up the turntable and slid the keys under it and into the guts of the console. I heard them drop to the bottom.

Safe and comfy with my ingenious plan's execution, I strolled out of the front door to await my unsuspecting parents. I glanced at my watch; it was one-forty. I dared not lean against the Corvette because the dust came off with slightest touch, but nonetheless I stood close to it, while watching the street before me. Any minute, I knew, a van would turn the corner and my parents would be home. Then, as it always does at the eleventh hour, absolute disaster struck: I glanced at the Corvette once again and this time noticed my Husqvarna Motocross Racing baseball cap and a sign that said "anywhere" behind the driver's seat of the Chevy sports car. I all but wet my pants.

"How did your hat and that piece of cardboard get in a LOCKED Corvette?" she would surely ask. I ran to my room. I flipped over the console and ripped at the turntable. I rocked it back and forth until my back screamed. Finally the keys popped out. I ran to the car, opened the door, pulled out the hat and sign and then locked the car again. Six seconds later my parents rolled up in the shuttle van. I put the hat on, folded the cardboard up, and welcomed them home.

I was surprised when after only an hour my mom was in her car and driving to the store. She returned. Now was the moment of truth, I knew. Would she simply walk by with her bag of groceries and go about her business? I saw that the answer was 'no' as she walked straight to where I lay on the couch.

"How stupid do you think I am?" she asked. I swear to God she asked me that. I took a deep breath and began to frame my answer. This, I knew, would get me kicked out of the house, immediately. I was about to answer when she said, "I know you and your friends partied here the whole two weeks we were gone." She turned away with a mild look of disgust after I only shrugged. I was left lying there with my knees shaking. I watched as she put the groceries down and turned to my dad. "What kind of wax have you been using on my car?" she asked.

"Regular stuff," my dad answered, "why?"

"At thirty miles an hour all the dust blew right off. It looks brand new and shiny right now!"

Footnote: fifteen years later I was visiting my parents and the subject of the Corvette came up. I told them the same story, just about word for word as above. My parents listened in silence, mouths agape. When I was done, they still said nothing, but my father rose and left the room. He returned with something in his hand.

"Ten years ago we sold that stereo to a neighbor for ten bucks. He cleaned it, made it work again and returned these to me," he said. In his hand, still tied together with the colorful friendship string that Mara had given me so long ago, were a couple of keys from a Dark Claret 1980 Corvette Stingray.

During the two weeks that I had the house and the Corvette I arranged a rare Saturday off from work. That night a waitress at the pie place, Sheryl, was having a party, in a nearby neighborhood. I started the day sleeping in and then cleaning the house (I promised my parents I would at least do that much). I spent the afternoon waxing the Corvette, washing my jeans, and sipping a beer (Anthony had stocked my fridge in a moment of great kindness, and because I gave him a wad of money). I even went out and bought some new clothes. As afternoon turned to evening I was all set for the night's festivities—I had a shiny Corvette, an address for a party and new shirt—in other words I was living and loving life.

The sun had just begun to set when I fired up the Corvette. The whole car pulsed with power. It made even the act of backing out of a driveway fun. Soon I was rolling down the boulevard, watching street signs and studying a strip of paper with an address on it.

I was stopped at a light, in the right lane, at Chapman and the 57 Freeway when a cardboard sign with the word "anywhere" on it was thrust before me. I turned to see the sign holder was a young guy that looked like Dennis Hopper's character Billy in Peter Fonda's epic movie, Easy Rider. He had curly shoulder-length hair, a headband, suede jacket with fringe and, even though it was dark, he was wearing sunglasses. All he needed to complete the image was his middle finger up, flipping the bird. He had a Charles Manson air about him, so, of course, I waved him over.

"Want to go to a party?" I asked. The way this guy's face lit up, you'd think I had offered King Richard III a ride on Seabiscuit and a new saddle. He threw the sign behind my seat and jumped in. I laughed and pushed the Corvette as hard as it would roll off the green light. That car could really push you back into its fine leather seats.

I found the address and spotted both the Charger and Mara's Porsche in the driveway, but the house before us was dark and disquietingly, well, quiet. I had been told to use the side entrance because the party was to take place in the backyard. Charlie Manson and I pushed through the gate and rounded a corner next to a pile of firewood.

"Ash!" At least six people shouted my name at once—it was something straight out of Cheers, where they would shout Norm! I grinned and watched Anthony (whose real name was Daryl) shake his head in wonder. Before us, on scattered outdoor furniture, in a semi-lit yard ringed with Tiki Torches, sat Mara, Anthony, Jameson and a few others. To call the atmosphere subdued would be akin to calling the RMS Titanic a maritime disappointment.

"Who died?" I asked. When no one answered, I said, in a voice that turned out to be way too loud, "Who wants to smoke a fattie?" I was instantly met with fingers to pursed lips, shushing me.

"Hush. Sheryl's parents decided to stay home and chaperone the party," Mara said.

"We're drinking fruit punch," said Anthony.

"And eating chips," Jameson said, "They promised us cake later."

"If we're really good," said Mara.

"We can't leave, either," said someone in a depressed voice.

"Yeah, that would be rude."

"Because Sheryl's nice folks might think we do other stuff at parties besides eat cake and drink nice sweet fruit punch," said Jameson.

I couldn't stop laughing. But as amused as I was I couldn't help taking little backwards steps. If I could get to the wood pile, I surmised, I might be able to make a hasty getaway, but it was not to be.

"Get back here," Mara said. It was almost a growl.

"Yeah, have some yummy punch," Anthony said. "It's sitting on that table all warm like with a fly floating in it."

"I can ask for some ice." For the first time I noticed that Becky was there also. She seemed to miss the point the others were making about their dissatisfaction with the event's beverages.

"Who's your friend?" someone asked.

"His name is Edwardo; he's my cousin from Spain. He doesn't speak English." Edwardo-Charlie-Manson-Daryl explained he was from Seattle and that he did indeed speak English. "But only the Queen's English," I said. "That doesn't count."

After staring at each other for a while, I waved everyone together and spoke in a whisper. "I got a parent-less house with a pool, a fridge full of beer and a baggie full of weed." I had everyone's attention. "I say Sheryl's problems are Sheryl's problems." I was greeted with a host of nods. "If one or two of us leaves, it's rude. But if we all run at full speed to our cars screaming like banshees, then we're not rude, just crazy, right?" More nods came my way.

"On the count of three," Mara said. "One... Two... Thr..." What happened next could have been straight out of the film Animal House, by National Lampoon. Screaming like madmen about eight of us rounded the wood pile and burst through the gate. Then it was like a game of musical chairs, only with car seats.

As we squealed our tires and raced away I saw Becky in my rearview mirror, standing in the middle of the street with her arms spread wide in exasperation, or perhaps confusion or perhaps both. I hit the brakes and put the Corvette in reverse. "Sit on his lap," I shouted.

Soon the three of us, me, Becky and Mr. Hitch-hiker, in two seats, were roaring down the boulevard toward my mom's house in Fullerton. A big party ensued. I remember shouting "Who wants to smoke the biggest joint in the world!" I remember taking my Dad's ladder and propping it up against the house so that people could climb it to access the roof. From the roof we did cannon-balls into the pool. I remember water being everywhere. I remember being half-naked, soaked, stoned and drunk. I remember making out with some girl. I remember getting the munchies. I remember hugging and singing along with my new hitchhiker friend (whose big backpack actually had a ukulele in it) and promising to be blood-brothers forever. Not much more than that do I remember, though.

The thing about partying deep into the night is that it makes mornings unpredictable, sometimes surprising, usually remorseful and always nauseating. I awoke alone on my parent's living room couch with my head spinning and racked with an incredible thirst. None of the others were around. I dragged myself to the kitchen for some water only to pause at the sight before me. My family's dining area, the stove and the sink looked like a war zone, destroyed by a host of culinary psycho zombies. Pots and pans lay everywhere. The counters were smeared with food. Empty cans of chili lay on the floor.

The whole kitchen looked like a nasty, greasy, every dish dirty... mess. After drinking about a gallon of tap-water I turned toward the clutter and sighed. During the next two hours, while nursing a slowly ebbing hangover, I became a cleaning machine. I started with loads and loads of hot sudsy water, dishrags, trash bags and mops. I washed pans, pots and skillets. Apparently, late into the night, we made something called Chili-Mac, which is cans and cans of chili mixed with macaroni and cheese. No dish could have been a worse choice—everything was gooey, sticky and encrusted with orange spackling paste—and brown grease.

After the dishes and a walk through of the living area and back yard that yielded a dozen beer cans and twice as many red plastic cups, I got out cleaners and furniture polish and wiped down every surface in the front of the house. During this time I let a hose run in the pool to refill our splashed out water.

Finally I had the house back in order. After a bite to eat, a shower and fresh clothes I felt somewhat human again. I found my 'bag o weed' which just the day before was full, but which now held only the scrawniest of crumbs. I sighed and threw myself onto the couch. That's when I heard the noise. It was a cough. I turned to find, emerging from the back of the house, Edwardo-Charlie-Manson-Daryl looking none too worse the wear, party or not.

"Dude!" he exclaimed. "You are a party-freaking-machine!" he continued. "That was a fucking blast!" I stared at him. He looked exactly like what he was, an eighteen-year-old free-soul-bohemian-bum. During my living-life-large-loving-everything super-party evening, Edwardo-Charlie-Manson-Daryl seemed like the perfect guy to have around. Now, however, that I was lucid, sober and exhausted, he looked like a nuisance, or worse, trouble. And on top of that, he had a big, LET'S HAVE MORE FUN, grin on his face. I did not need more fun at that point. I needed a nap and I needed to work at the pie place, in just a few short hours. "That was the coolest party, EVER," he said while sitting next to me. "And the beds here are sooo comfy. Remember that feast? Awesome! Hey, got any weed left?" he asked.

"Dude," I began, while gritting my teeth, and then I hesitated. I didn't want to say what I had to, but I couldn't let someone I had only known for twenty-four hours roam my parent's house alone while I was at work. So I said, to this smiling, happy soul, what I needed to say.

"I'll take you anywhere within twenty miles, but you got to go." In the end I left Edwardo-Charlie-Manson-Daryl on the same freeway on-ramp where I had found him, sans his homemade sign. As I drove off I took one last glance back. What I saw was the most forlorn, sad, please take me back let's have another party, soul experiencing a bottomless sorrow that I never before seen in my entire life. I turned the Corvette on the first street heading away from his direction and sighed. That, I said to myself, was that.

As a footnote to the story, Sheryl disowned us, and, like Copper before her, joined the Jesus crowd and became a staunch recruiter. I never saw the hitch-hiker again, but I do wish him well, even though, that night of the party, with three empty rooms to choose from, it was my parent's king-sized bed he slept in.

After my parents returned home I became bored and depressed. I no longer enjoyed my family's company—actually I didn't enjoy much of anything that didn't involve getting stoned or drunk with the group—with one exception: I still loved motorcycles.

The garage was a perfect sanctuary, I could still be home, eat and do laundry, yet keep a distance from my more and more curious by the day overlords, and, as I mentioned, I had dismantled my Husqvarna 250cc bike. Also, if I didn't put the bike back together things would look out of place, and as my life at that point was pretty crazy, it was important to keep up appearances.

Plus I had another reason: Becky invited me to go to the desert to do some riding with her family. I must admit I didn't put much thought into the idea of hanging out with ditzy Becky and her family that I had never met, but, since it was a way to get out of the house with my parent's more or less blessing, I jumped (with some regret later) at the chance.

Retrieving a beer I had stashed that was left over from the house party, I settled in the garage and examined my bike, its parts, and its overall condition. Let's first mention that this bike was cursed. I don't really believe in that sort of thing but this bike really was cursed. Its original owner bought the bike and within a year had to sell it after a partner embezzled their business funds and he had to declare bankruptcy. The next owner sold it because he had to go through a financially devastating divorce. The next owner crashed the bike and promptly went from a ten-fingered man to a nine-fingered man. The break lever cut off his pinky, I kid you not. Then I bought the bike for about six-hundred bucks.

I went through the parts I had before me. The chain, the tires, the air filter and the sprocket were still in fantastic shape, as was the seat and bright red mirrored gas tank. Back then we didn't use fancy cleaners and solvents—I soaked the chain and the air filter in gasoline, then dried and oiled them up in regular oil and reinstalled them. I wiped down the bike in its entirety and refitted the tank and seat onto the frame. I took the tire pressure and filled the rear with more air. I checked and adjusted the brakes and filled the tank with gas. The bike was ready to go.

Becky's brother would be dropping by to pick up me and my bike and then we would be off to a place I had never been before, a place they called Cal-City Desert, off Highway 395. We left on Saturday (Becky and her family would already be there, having arrived on Friday, but her brother and I had to work) and things went pretty smoothly. We had a campfire that night and everybody seemed nice. But I soon found that I had nothing in common with my hosts; Becky's mom was a giggler like Becky, actually, she more cackled than giggled. She burst out laughing at EVERYTHING, and her brothers and I simply had nothing in common and nothing to talk about.

The next day they roared off without me; I later learned that they were headed to a bar that they had heard about somewhere out in the middle of the desert and didn't want me along because I was barely twenty. Becky went out on a dune buggy ride with her mom and I found myself alone with three mangy flea-bitten dogs, on a chilly late Sunday morning.

I surveyed all the area around our camp; to the south were low hills and a stretch of open desert. To the north was a tall hill. After riding around a bit to get orientated, I decided to take my bike to the top of the tall hill to get a better overall view of the valley in which we were camped. This was HUGE MISTAKE NUMBER ONE. I was alone in a strange place, I should have stayed in view of the camp, but I thought I'd just jet up the hill and then zoom right back down again. The thing with the hill was that it was a lot farther away and a lot higher than it looked from camp, the desert can do that, make things appear different than they are. Also there was no good trail up the hill, the one I found was deeply rutted and filled with big rocks. So I left the trail and blazed my own way (you can see where this is going) and that was HUGE MISTAKE NUMBER TWO. I came down the hill a different way than I had come up it, and that was HUGE MISTAKE NUMBER THREE. After riding around a bit I couldn't find the camp, so I decided to climb the hill again so that I could maybe see our motor-home ringed outpost. Only there was a problem, now there were three hills—one to my left, one to my right and one straight ahead of me—and they all looked the same. I picked the hill to my right and was aghast to see, from the very top, nothing but endless stretches of sand before me. As far as I could see there was nothing but empty desert. I tried the next hill. After riding for about an hour I was on top of that one, but with the very same result: no camp, no roads, no trails, no nothing lay for miles and miles around in every direction.

I figured it was by now about one-thirty in the afternoon. I wasn't panicky yet, but it did pop into my mind that it was winter, which meant it would get dark early, like at about five-thirty, and that the first thing I saw in the morning was the dog's bowl. I remembered the dog's bowl because it was full of water. But that wasn't what caught my attention, it was the fact that the water was frozen solid that caught my eye. In other words, the previous night got cold, freezing in fact.

I rode to the third hill, and saw something in the distance. Breathing a huge sigh of relief I gunned the Husky down the steep slope and toward what looked like a camp about five miles away. Even if it were to turn out not to be our camp I figured I could at least ask for directions. But, as always when things are bad, they then get worse. The camp turned out not to be a camp at all, instead what I found were ghost-town like shanty buildings. The wood they were made of was blackened and all the buildings had either partially collapsed or were leaning heavily. They were filled with rat droppings and tons of bird shit.

At this point I still wasn't panicky but the hairs on the back of my neck had begun to stand up. Standing among the blackened ruins, with the wind biting me in chilly nips through my thin nylon motorcycle jersey, I began to feel a distinct sense of urgency. Common sense would have dictated that long ago I should have stopped chasing my tail and remained in one place to be found, either accidentally or by someone searching for me.

I remember standing next to the disintegrating structures, watching tumbleweeds blow by, almost as if I were in a trance, when I was shaken awake by a quail-like bird bursting from one of the buildings. Startled, I began to feel an almost overwhelming anxiety. I leaped on my bike and began to do the opposite of what I should have done—I began to race through the desert as fast as my bike would carry me—I was determined to get somewhere, anywhere, to run across something, anything, and I figured that the more ground I covered the better chance I had to find something other than just sand and tumbleweeds. I was no longer looking for camp; I was now just trying to flee the desolation of the harsh lands around me.

That strategy all but led to my ruin, when, at a high speed I came across a deep ravine unexpectedly. I knew I would not be able to stop the bike so I did the only thing I could, as I crested the lip of the ravine, I pulled up on the handlebars and threw my weight to the back of the motorcycle. I found myself airborne at about fifty mile per hour. It was a harrowing feeling to see the ground drop out from under the bike, but the strategy worked, I was able to get the front tire up, and land the bike with my weight on the back tire. Only by God's grace (I know, I'm an Agnostic, but not really when it comes to dying) was the terrain in front of me suitable for a hard landing. If a log or a Juniper tree or even a cactus had been in my path I would have probably been in a serious crash. Instead I hit the ground hard and bounced about but kept the Husky under control. Badly shaken, my strategy changed; I began to cruise around, wide eyed, peering past every bush and wash, while waiting for the unexpected. It came, though not as I had imagined—I ran out of gas. The Husky had a reserve, but it was only good for a few miles. I knew I was running out of options, but it seemed like there was nothing I could do about it.

Because a bike like the Husky has no gas gauge the designers made part of the tank a reserve, so when you run out of gas you really don't run out of gas, you still have a little bit left in the bottom of the tank that you can access by a peacock-like switch. The idea is that when you know you are low on gas and you hear the bike kind of hiccup you can reach down, flip on the reserve and ride to where you can gas up. It's a good idea, unless you happen to be in the middle of the desert, miles and miles from anywhere. I figured I had about thirty to forty minutes of riding left on that bike. Heading off in the same direction, I putted along skirting brush and rocks.

All I came across was more of the same; same bushes, same rocks, same endless stretches of sand greeted me until the bike finally sputtered to a stop. I found myself next to a bone dry, dead bike, and, the golden orb of the sun had just begun to touch the horizon. I figured I'd been lost, brainlessly riding, for about seven and a half hours. There were many times I could have improved my situation: at the shanty buildings I could have tipped the bike, got some gas out and possibly made a fire with the dead wood that was strewn about (though I had no matches). I could have stayed by the first set of hills. At noon, after being lost for two hours, I could have just climbed a hill and waited for someone to come along. Instead I panicked, lost my mind, and now I was hundreds of miles, deep into the desert with only a light jersey on, with no food or water, and even less hope. I did next what seemed most logical.

"Helpppppp!" I shouted. If I were in a Mall or on a bus or in a building even, screaming at the top of my lungs would have been an eardrum shattering experience. In the desert my loudest scream was stifled—snuffed out by an endless expanse of nothingness. The word died such a graceless death that I could only stand there and feel like a total idiot. Next I did what I thought was logical if not very effective. I sat down in the sand and felt sorry for myself. I cursed those I didn't know for things I did to myself. I was completely alone, with a DOA bike, in an expanse of desert where, as far as the eye could see, there was not a single man-made object.

Ten minutes later it was dark. Ten minutes after that it was freezing. Rising above the horizon came a half moon—at least, I thought, it wouldn't be pitch black. And, because it was winter I figured I wouldn't have to worry about snakes, especially the poisonous kind.

Sitting in the sand, arms wrapped tight around me but still shivering, I thought I saw something. On the horizon, just off to my left, were some twinkling stars. In my peripheral vision I would see just the faintest of sparkles, but when I stared straight at the tiny lights, they disappeared.

Well, I thought, sitting and freezing seemed a distant second best to doing anything else, so I rose and best I could, headed for the little, only seen in my peripheral vision, lights. I walked straight toward the tiny pin-points of brightness, through ravines, bushes, over fallen Joshua trees (they are part of the lily family) or maybe they were Yucca plants, I don't know, but I let nothing impede my straight line toward the twinkling lights. Walking was a good idea; it gave me something to do, it warmed me in the cold night (I walked with my helmet and gloves on, like a spaceman from a 1950's movie, to be the warmest possible) and it helped clear my mind. Leaving the bike behind was the hardest part; I was pretty sure I would never see that cursed bitch ever again, and to tell the truth, I wasn't really all that upset about it.

After walking for what I guessed was about an hour and a half, my spirits rose. There were indeed lights, in an unmistakable line on the horizon before me, and now, I could see them by staring right at them. I could tell there was a highway in front of me. However, the lights, even after an hour and a half of walking, were still tiny and far away. My guess was that the road I was heading for was some ten miles still in the distance. At three miles an hour, my guess at my walking speed, that road and its precious cars with their wonderful twinkling headlights were still a good three hours away. Since I figured sunset was at about five-thirty, and since I had sat for a good hour feeling sorry for myself, I calculated that at about eleven o'clock I would be at the road, baring some unforeseen tragedy like twisting an ankle or falling into an abandon mine.

Neither happened—I just walked and walked and walked. Then I walked and walked some more. Soon I could see actual cars and trucks. It wasn't just a road before me; it was a major highway. Which could mean only one thing, sometime deep into the night I would be cresting a mound and I would find Highway 395. So I walked. And I walked. Soon I could hear the vehicles as well as see them. After what seemed like the longest walk of my life, I climbed a steep embankment and found myself beside a startlingly loud, busy, bustling, brightly lit with an array of headlights, major Southern California transportation artery. I WAS SAVED! I stood beside the road and stuck out my thumb.

An hour later I was heartily pissed off. Sixty minutes later I was still at the same stretch of road—no one would pick me up. It wasn't like I was some deranged psycho dressed in rags; I was obviously a lost, desperate motocrosser in need of help!

I was about to throw myself in front of a big, slow truck when a large Chevy Suburban pulled off the road. I ran to the SUV. Someone opened a door and I climbed in. In the auto were four young, long-hair-ish people, two guys and two very pretty girls. They wrapped me in a thick blanket because I was shivering from sweat and cold after my walk and from standing beside the road for an hour. They gave me an apple, which I devoured. I thanked them profusely for stopping and picking me up. Then one of the girls leaned close.

"Jesus loves you," she whispered. I HAD BEEN RESCUDED BY NEWBORN CHRISTIANS! You know, the crowd I rudely shunned at the pie place! JESUS SAVED ME! Jeeze, I felt like a jackass. Then something happened that I've never told anyone about. I began to cry. I began to weep like a baby, in uncontrollable sobs. I wept and wept and wept. I don't know why I broke down, it never happened before nor has it ever happened since.

"I got lost," I said through sobs to these loving, genuinely sincere people.

"Jesus will show you the way," they all said together.

"No, I mean... I was really lost... in the desert."

"We know what you mean, we heard about you on the radio," they said. "We're glad you're okay," someone said. "There's a CHP helicopter looking for you." I stopped sobbing.

"REALLY?"

They pulled over at the first gas station off the highway and let me keep their blanket. They gave me cookies and bottled water and some beef jerky. They gave me change for a pay phone and offered to stay with me. I declined and told them I didn't want them to go through any more trouble and that since they probably had jobs and that since it was late on a Sunday they should probably go about their business. We all hugged, waved, and they left. I turned toward the brightly lit by florescent lights, gas station office, and walked through the door.

"You the A-Hole everybody's looking for?" asked the greasy, nasty, all but toothless attendant.

"I Guess."

"Where's your bike?" asked a guy leaning against a wall, to my left. He looked like he was straight out of the movie The Hills Have Eyes. I mean he made his all but toothless friend look downright civilized. He had hair down to his waist, he was covered with a host of homemade or prison tattoos, he was missing his front tooth, and he was beyond dirty, like Ajax and steel wool couldn't help the guy.

"Out there," I said. "It would probably be impossible to find." I lamely added. "AND, IT'S CURSED." I said. Now that I was safe, the idea that my bike was out there, sitting, just for the taking, all of a sudden bothered me.

"I'm going coney hunt'n tomorrow" (that's a desert jackrabbit to you and me), the leaning guy said, "maybe I'll look for your bike. Which side of the road is in on, and how far to 395 did you have to walk?"

"Here," the toothless attendant handed me a phone with grease stains all over it.

"This is Ash."

"This is officer James MacHeere of the California Highway Patrol." Well... after what seemed like a scolding from an officer of the law, he said he would notify my hosts about my whereabouts and that everything was okay, and then he hung up.

"It's on the same side as this gas station," I said. I figure someone should own that cursed bike and that leather-face was as good a candidate as anyone. "Probably about twelve miles deep, about a ten minute drive down the highway." He nodded and asked for my number. I gave it to him. Just then I noticed Becky's brother pull into the station.

"Get the fuck in the truck," Becky's no longer nice brother shouted when he saw me.

"What about my bike?" I asked. As you can probably guess I wasn't thinking too clearly. It was about one in the morning on a workday Monday, and my hosts were über pissed.

"FUCK YOUR FUCKING BIKE." Was what he shouted, all rude like.

I slept in on Monday and missed some classes at the college I was attending. I didn't have a shift at the pie place so I just moped about all day when the phone rang.

"Got your bike. Got a pen and paper?" I couldn't believe it, Leather-face had my bike and after giving me his address told me to come and get it. NOW I had a problem. The only person I knew that had a truck, that still loved me, was my hard working, not-to-keen-on-me-these-days, dad. I waited for him to come home from work. He walked in the door.

"Dad, a guy in the desert found my bike."

"Where is it?" he asked.

"Cal-City, off the 395."

"You fucking shitting me?" dad said in a not so nice voice. "That's a fucking a four-hour round trip, asshole."

In the end my dad did what he always did, he came to my rescue. We drove the two hours out to the desert on a Monday rush-hour afternoon. We found the address to the rabbit-hunting guy's house. It was a nice little desert abode, painted beige and orange with wagon wheels and an ornamental plow out front. There were cute kids running around in the yard and a nice looking woman watching them.

"Dallas, that bike-guy's here," she shouted as we pulled into the driveway. There, in the front yard, next to the playing kids, stood, good as new, my cursed Husky. Then the leather-face guy came out. He was cleaned up and looked normal. We, all three, loaded the bike into the back of my dad's truck. The desert guy stood back and waved us off.

"You got any money, retard?" my dad asked all sweetly while in the truck.

"No."

"Jesus-H-Christ-Almighty," my dad muttered under his breath. He then actually pulled out his wallet. He removed two twenties from it.

"Give this to the guy." I gave the rabbit-hunter the twenties. I palmed it like you do to a concierge in Vegas. The guy made the bills disappear and gave me a huge minus-one tooth, smile.

"Get rid of that bike, boy," he whispered, "I'm not gonna tell you why, but you are every inch right, that frigg'n shit-bag be jinxed like a motherfuck."

P.S. I sold that bike that very week. The guy who bought it from me went from a normal dude to a coke-fiend in four months. He traded the bike for drugs. Like I said, that machine was cursed.

As I had mentioned earlier, I had had a talk with Bobby about bringing Christy to his trailer for a tryst, now and then. He was cool about it and Christy and I had some fun times. One day we went over to Bobby's, six-pack in hand, only to find he was busy smoking a joint with his and my friend Rick. Rick was a cool hippy, and I was pretty sure it was his pot Bob and he were smoking. They asked us to come in and we split the beers between us in plastic cups. We crowded into the tiny bed Bob had; the four of us each taking a corner.

The trailer was an older model, it was a dark (the thing had tiny windows), kind of musty smelling thing and, with Bob's clothes strewn about, very cramped. But it was still a sanctuary away from our parents. After the joint and beers Christy found a pack of playing cards sitting on the counter next to the trailer's tiny, non-working sink.

"Let's play strip poker!" she exclaimed. I'm not making that up, here we were, three guys and Christy, in a dank trailer, in the backyard of a suburban Orange County house, cramped all together and that's what she says. Like I said before, she had a rather ravenous appetite for things other than food. We boys looked at each other. SURPRISINGLY, nobody had any objections. Christy sat there smiling and playing with the cards.

"What kind of poker do you want to play?" Rick asked.

"What do you mean?" asked Christy.

"Well... Five Card Draw, Seven Card Stud, Hold Em, what?" Bobby asked.

"What are those?" asked Christy.

"Games," I said, "Poker Games. Do you know which hand beats which?" I asked.

"You mean like if a nine is higher than a ten?" she asked all innocent like.

"I mean, does a Flush beat a Full House?"

"What are those?" Christy asked again. We boys glanced at each other. Finally Bob spoke up.

"You ever play Black Jack?"

"Yes!" Christy said, "that's where you try to get twenty-one!"

"That's right," I said, "let's play strip Black Jack, lowest hand, or busted hand takes off one piece of clothing." So there we were, playing strip Black Jack—what could go wrong, I wondered—then I saw exactly what could go wrong.

"Hit," she said.

"Christy," I began, "you have nineteen. You don't hit nineteen." Of course I knew what she was going to say next, this was after all, our precious Christy.

"Hit!" Off comes a shoe. Then another.

"Christy!" I pleaded, "you have twenty, stand pat!"

"Hit!" said she. Yup, you guessed it; soon Christy was wearing only her underclothes. We three boys had yet to remove even a single sock, and Christy was down to just two pieces of underwear. "Hit!"

"Don't give her a card Rick, she has eighteen." Bob had nineteen and Rick and I each built to twenty, so Christy lost again.

"See why I hit?" she exclaimed. Then, I kid you not, she said, "Oh well, they're only boobies." And then came the Piste de Résistance, as she giggled the next phrase. "I hope I don't get gang-banged."

"THAT'S IT!" I said. I didn't think about it, I just blurted it out. Actually I more or less shouted it. "Get your clothes back on." Soon we were back in my Mustang and headed toward Christy's home. I shook my head.

"What?" asked Christy. "WHAT?"

We had a new manager at the pie place; our likable Christian one was promoted to the day shift. The new guy had a thick black mustache that reminded me of the grease-paint one Groucho Marx used to wear. He was friendly but had a nervous go-getter attitude that we found kind of irritating. He had been there about a week and seemed to be trying hard to make an impression. He watched our orders leaving the window and wandered around our station getting in the way. He made stupid suggestions.

Our Christian manager cared about one thing—that the best food possible came out of a clean kitchen. The new guy, whose name was Sammy, seemed to care more about appearances. He cared if our plates weren't stacked neatly enough, he cared if our aprons weren't on correctly (Jameson wore his only around his waist, and did not loop it around his neck because he was too tall), he cared that our hats weren't on straight enough. Soon we had enough of the guy, and we began to ignore, or worse, mess with him. I walked in one day and Anthony called me aside.

"Check this out," he said. In a drawer before us were some of the most beautiful top sirloin steaks I had ever seen. Every once in a while our food distributors would get a good deal on something and we would offer it as a Daily Special. That day we had steak with steak fries and fresh asparagus. We filled the oven with potatoes in case anyone wanted a baked one. Then Anthony picked out the thickest steak in the tray. "Interested?" he asked.

We had special stash areas where we kept food. We never kept anything in the cooking area, but we had plenty of places elsewhere to hide a plate. I had just taken a big bite of the steak that Anthony had made for me when Sammy walked by. He had a bag of rolls.

"Ash," Sammy asked, "you want a roll; they're a little too stale for the customers, but still good."

"No thanks," I said while chewing, "I'm having steak." Sammy laughed.

"Oh, you guys are too funny," he said.

"Regular cut-ups," I said. Over to my left I caught a glimpse of Anthony just dying of laughter. I mean he was regular like guffawing. I took another bite and smiled. Sometimes it was fun to be a cook.

Other times it wasn't. One Spring day I had just walked into work—at the start of a shift, before it got too busy, we restocked our kitchen. We filled the lettuce bins, replaced the drawers with fresh food and switched out stainless steel containers of condiments with clean new ones. I saw that the burger drawer was all but empty. I removed the burgers figuring I'd restock the drawer with fresh ground beef while putting the older burgers on top, to use first. I pulled a box from our walk in refrigerator. We regularly rotated our stock to make sure everything was fresh. But every once in a while something goes wrong; In this case it was the box of burgers. It was older stock with an older date than all the other boxes of burgers. It somehow got pushed to the back and forgotten. When I opened it I didn't like the smell. It wasn't really bad; it just didn't have that fresh ground beef smell. Then I touched the burgers. Raw ground beef should be tacky or a little sticky, but these were more than that. The whole box, eight across, five layers deep, were slimy. I called Sammy to the kitchen.

"Will you look at these for me, they don't seem right," I said. He examined the burgers.

"Boy, that's a lot of beef to throw out," he said. "I'll tell you what," he continued, "use these for the well done orders. Just cook them real good." With that he walked away. I was literally horrified. We, as cooks, had one unbreakable rule: we would never, ever, serve anything to anyone we would not eat ourselves. Period. It wasn't that we were all high-and-mighty about it; it was just that we knew right from wrong regardless of profit margins or business decisions. I took the burgers to the back, and out the rear door. I placed them in the green dumpster behind the pie place.

"What the hell you doing, boy?" To the side of the dumpster Jameson and Mara were taking a break, just talking. Mara had taken up smoking and Jameson was just hanging out with her. I told them what happened. Jameson pulled the box of burgers from the dumpster and opened it up. He ran his finger across a few of the patties. I could see his face get red right then and there. He put the box under his arm and told me to follow him. Since it was the beginning of the shift, Paul, the Christian manager, who now worked days, was still in the office, sorting out receipts or something. Jameson put the box of burgers before Paul. Mara stood behind us with her arms folded. "I found junior here," Jameson began, "putting these in the dumpster." Paul looked at the burgers, smelled them and touched them.

"They're bad," Paul said. "I don't have any problem with that. Good job Ash, just talk to us next time."

"He did." Jameson told Paul. "Ash, tell him what you just told Mara and I." I told Paul that Sammy said to use the burgers for quote: the well done ones, unquote. "Paul," Jameson began, "my family eats here. My friends eat here. Ash happens to have a good head on his shoulders but that's not the case with everyone around this place." I realized Jameson was beyond pissed. He was wide-eyed and had locked his gaze on Paul. "You need to take care of this," Jameson said while tapping his finger on Paul's desk. "And I mean really take care of this." Jameson was our best cook, had tons of seniority and well, was an imposing figure. But Paul didn't bat an eye.

"I will take care of this, Jameson. You guys go back to your stations." Ten minutes later Sammy left the pie place. He was let go on the spot.

Then Jameson and I went to work. We got a big platter. We made fresh fries. Next to the fries we stacked a triple-decker burger that had onions, tomatoes, pickles, lettuce and cheddar and Swiss cheese on it. Grabbing a stack of napkins we called Mara to the cook station. Then, along with a large chocolate shake, Jameson, myself and Mara went to the manager's office. We placed the giant Mega-Burger plus fries, napkins and drink before Paul. Together, with a few other servers joining us, we said a great big 'Thank You' in unison. Paul grinned from ear to ear.

"I bet all this stuff is real fresh," was all he said.

Chapter 4

I first met Bryce at a party Jimmy had for his girlfriend's nineteenth birthday. Bryce was Jimmy's big contact and why Jimmy always had good weed. They had been lifelong friends, even though Bryce was ten years older than Jim. Bryce looked like Donald Sutherland as he appeared in M*A*S*H. He had a high brow and curly hair. He had a long nose and piercing eyes. It was rumored that Bryce had a checkered past and that he was a major player in the world of herb-distribution.

All I knew was that weed was hard to find, expensive and that Jimmy always had plenty of personal stash and that it was always of very good quality. What's weird about buying weed is that you never know what you are going to get. A dealer never says "Oh, this stuff is shit, but I need to move it anyway." They may tell you that after you buy it, when you come back, because the 'Primo' or 'The Kind' stuff they have now, is sooo much better. Basically it's a crapshoot when buying weed off the black market. This was well before highbred strains of marijuana and grow labs and hydroponic systems existed, or at least those conditions were the exception, not the norm, back then.

Now-a-days, at least in California, a doctor's certification can get you weed with such a high concentration of THC, the mild hallucinogen that gets you high, that to smoke a whole joint would practically put you in a coma. But back then dirt weed, crap that just made you cough, was very common.

But Jimmy always had plenty of good stuff, which was strange because he was rarely employed. I soon found out that it was because of Bryce that Jim was always holding great stuff; Bryce and Jimmy were pals, it was that simple. Since I was always winding up with shit weed I really wanted to get to know Bryce, only Jimmy was extremely closed-mouth about his older, and much cooler than us, friend.

"What's Bryce like?" I asked one day.

"Just a regular guy," Jimmy said.

"What's he do for a living?"

"Not sure," said Jim.

"Who does he hang out with?"

"No one, really."

"What's he like to do?"

"He just hangs." Every conversation about Bryce from Jimmy went like that. All I really knew was that Bryce lived close to Jim, and that Jim lived in Anaheim, land of Disney parks and neighborhoods where Gwen Stefani grew up. Anaheim had nice sections, not so nice sections, hilly sections and lots of hotels and motels.

"Can you introduce me to him?"

"Who?"

"Bryce!"

"I don't really know the guy," said Jim.

"HE GIVES YOU FREE WEED!" I all but shouted. Jimmy seemed to cringe. "Jimmy, man, I just want to know someone who won't rip me off with that shitty dirt weed that's always around." Jimmy always had this stuff we called Red-haired Sess, short for sensimilla (or sin semilla), which meant it had no seeds and had these fine red hairs running through it. Also, most Mexican weed was smuggled into Southern California vacuum packed, which means at some point the buds got smashed all to hell and that sometimes it smelled moldy. Jimmy's weed from Bryce was always nice, round, puffy, airy, sweet-skunky smelling balls. In short Jimmy's weed from Bryce was all but perfect. I always wound up with weed with stems so thick you could poke someone's eye out and so many seeds you could start your own moldy-dirt-cough-machine weed farm right then and there.

"Look, if you want to get to know Bryce, get to know Bryce," Jim said. "Just keep me out of it." I sighed. My dream of getting to know Bryce seemed hopeless.

"Thanks for throwing me a bone, good buddy." I whimpered. Jim rolled his eyes, started to walk away, and then came back.

"Weather or not you and Bryce can become great pals is between you and him." Jim said. He sighed. "I will tell you this. Bryce has a dog. If the dog doesn't like you, Bryce won't like you, and that's that. Sorry, but that's all I got for you. Good luck."

My search for a good, dependable dealer had seemed to have stalled, when one day I got a call from Jimmy.

"Hey Dude, a friend of mine is having a party in Whittier," he said. "Bryce's going to be there." I thanked Jim profusely and took down his friend's address.

That night came and I arrived with a six-pack of beer in hand. A stranger opened the door but let me right in. I scanned the crowd—all I saw was a relativity quiet living room filled with a dozen or so partiers holding red plastic cups. They all looked older than the people I regularly hung out with. Bryce was nowhere to be seen, neither could I find Jim. My heart sank. Then my eyes caught sight of Mara.

"Hey," I said.

"Hey, it's the Christy-poker guy," she said. I sighed. The more secret something was in our group, the more it got around. "And, it's behind your friend's back, with his girl, you little darling."

"Come on, I'm just... um..."

"Horny?"

"Yeah, I guess that's it. I guess I'll have to change my nickname to horny-pants."

"I get it," Mara said. "Did you know Anthony once did Becky?"

"No shit?"

"Yeah, right in back of the pie place." When Mara laughed it was more than infectious, it was like getting buzzed. I dared not tell her about my real mission at the party, nor did I ask her about who she knew there. We just talked the usual small talk everybody talks at parties. Soon others joined us and I got to know new people. Everybody at the party seemed cool, nobody was getting too drunk or too stupid, but neither did they dance or do anything more exciting than just converse quietly.

If it weren't for my search for a good dealer I would have left. I shared another beer with Mara and with a girl named Nancy when I saw Bryce come from the back of the house. Like I had said, I had once met Bryce at another party, only this time I didn't have Jimmy beside me. Even though he was said to be some kind of big-time operator, he was doing what everybody else was doing at the party, sitting around and bullshitting. When I saw him standing alone, browsing music (we still had these things called LPs back then) I excused myself from Mara and friends, ostensibly to use the bathroom, and approached Bryce.

"Hey Bryce," I said. We shook hands. Bryce just kind of stared at me. "Jimmy's friend... I work at the cafe on Cherry Street.

"Oh, yeah. Hi," he said.

"You should come by sometime," I said, "we make special food for our friends." I all of a sudden felt lame, stupid and boring.

"I'll do that," he said. I took a deep breath and decided to just say my piece.

"Bryce, if you ever find yourself needing an extra customer, call me." I had a piece of paper with my number on it and I held it out. Bryce ignored it. He just stared at me. But I was on a mission. I didn't come to the most boring party in the world just to make small talk about which low-IQ-ed just-turned-seventeen-year-old I happened to be bonking at the time. "I'm just saying if you ever find yourself overstocked, I'm here. I've got a lot of friends with the same super shitty contacts that I have." I kept at him. "I know Mara over there, and I have been friends with her for almost two years. I am friends with Anthony and even Jameson seems to like me at the pie place. I'm not stupid, nor am I indiscrete." I got him to smile. "I may look like an idiot; I usually don't act like one." He laughed.

"You're the guy they call piss-pants." Bryce said. "The guy that called a raccoon at Big Sur The Hamburglar."

"THAT WAS BOBBY! And I only did the PISS-PANTS thing ONCE," I said a little too loud. I told him the whole story about our Big Sur trip, including driving at one-hundred miles an hour and passing Mara's Porsche, which he seemed to enjoy. I told him the whole thing, from start to finish. It turned out he was as bored at the party as I was. I told him some of my favorite stories, including the mountain cabin trip where I brought six apple pies for people who absolutely, positively loathed pies. He even asked me about Christy, and then shared a bombshell with me.

"It wasn't just Anthony and Becky, behind the pie place that night," he said. "Jameson and Mara hooked-up too." My jaw dropped. It made sense, though; Jameson was the coolest guy in the crowd, and Mara the hottest.

I enjoyed talking to Bryce and had put my number away well into the conversation. It sat in my pocket all lonely like. I decided to get my weed elsewhere.

"Look, I got stuff to do," he said, "so I got to run. Nice talking to you." He waved and made his way to the door. Then he stopped. He came back to where I stood. "You forgot to give me your number," he said. That turned out to be the most fun boring party I ever attended.

A full week later Jimmy called. He wanted to meet by a park near his house. I drove there and we went for a walk.

"Okay, here are The Rules," he began. "Bryce may or may not call you, but you never call Bryce, understand?"

"I don't even have his number," I said.

"Ash, just shut up and listen. Bryce used to baby-sit me and my brother almost twenty years ago. He's a great guy. I love him. Our families are friends. I'm giving you the run-down, you listening or not?"

"Sorry, go on."

"You never call Bryce. If he calls you, you never say anything but yes or no." I felt like I was in a James Bond movie, and it was kind of fun. "All he will ask you over the phone is if you want to get together or not, and you only say yes or no, NOTHING ELSE. If he does give you his number, which is unlikely, the same thing goes. All anybody ever says on the phone is 'do you want to hang out', and the ONLY answer is 'yes' or 'no'. Okay?"

"Got it."

"Next, he only works with cash, absolutely no fronting."

"Got it."

"Next, he only moves half pounds or more."

"Fuck, that's... um..." I began.

"That's right," Jimmy said with a laugh, "He only moves eight ounces or more. You still interested?"

"Yup," I said while wondering how much eight ounces of good weed could cost.

"Next, Bryce doesn't need new friends," Jim said, "never, ever, bring a stranger to Bryce, got that?"

"Got it."

"Next, don't talk to anyone about Bryce. You don't know any Bryce," Jimmy said. "Got it?"

"Got it."

"If you ever mention money over the line, talk about Bryce to anyone, say anything stupid on the phone like 'Is Mr. Green in town?' you'll never, ever talk to Bryce again, got that?"

"Absolutely," I said.

"Okay, we'll see what happens," said Jim. And that was that. I didn't hear from Bryce or even Jimmy for three full weeks, and had all but decided that they were just fucking with me when the phone rang.

"Hello?"

"Do you want to hang out?" It was Bryce's voice.

"Yes," I said.

"Meet me at Jimmy's in an hour." Bryce drove a black Chevrolet Impala, and while it was in perfect condition, nothing about the car really drew attention to it—it was completely stock—paint, wheels and all. It was parked in front of Jimmy's house. Bryce told me to follow him. We drove a couple of blocks to a dead end street on a hill. Bryce lived in a big house with his mom, who, from what I could see, was almost never around. They lived at the very end of the street.

To be perfectly frank, I was nervous as hell. I had been hoarding my pie place money (my parents had yet to start collecting rent from me) but I wasn't in any way loaded. Still, I brought what I had. I was also terrified about one other thing. I remembered Jimmy's warning about Bryce's dog. Dogs usually like me but I wanted to hedge my bet.

I decided a bribe would increase my canine likeability factor. Before leaving I checked my parent's kitchen. I was looking for jerky or maybe a beef stick, but the cupboards were bare. Finally I decided on a can I found in the pantry. It had a picture of a chef on it. Inside the can was mushy spaghetti in a ketchup-like sauce. But it wasn't the pasta I wanted, that I tossed in the trash and covered with other household garbage. It was the four meatballs I wanted. Those I rinsed off and placed into a baggie, which I put in my pocket. That Dealer's Dog was going to like me, come hell-or-high-water.

I pulled behind Bryce and he led me to his room in the sprawling house at the end of the street in Anaheim. I sat in a chair while Bryce sat on his bed. Around me were all types of paraphernalia: scales, bongs, roach clips, baggies, lighters and pipes. There were also ample supplies of drugs about; to my left was a large pile of white powder and to my right sat a heap of red-haired, skunky smelling buds. Not five minutes passed before Bryce said he had to take care of some business in another room.

I want to be clear and up front about one thing: your stash is not safe around even your best of friends. You can usually trust your buddies around your wallet, your watch or any other valuable thing you own, but the exception to this rule is your stash (and sometimes your girlfriend). If one leaves dope laying around, one-hundred times out of one-hundred your friends will snort, steal or smoke it, it's just how it is.

Bryce was well out of sight, but I could hear him talking on the phone. I looked hard at the weed and the coke. I thought seriously about just doing a line or just taking one small bud, but after a long moment, I decided against it. If Bryce were any other guy, especially one of my close friends, I would have had a party right then and there and then I would have laughed in that friend's face for being so stupid. But Bryce seemed different, so I just stopped thinking about it and actually sat on my hands. After about ten minutes Bryce came back. I watched him scan the room in earnest, then he looked at me and smiled.

"Let's go to the back," he said. Bryce led me to his back yard and to a covered patio furnished with a sofa, a hammock and two plastic chairs. We sat in the chairs, which faced the couch. At the end of the couch sat a dog. He was a medium-sized, brown and white, what looked like a full bred, Springer Spaniel. Springer Spaniels are by and large good-natured, eager to please, happy, loving, dogs. Bryce seemed to own the one Springer in the whole world that was NOT of this disposition. I kid you not, that dog gave me the stink-eye from minute one. He did not rise or move at all, he just wide-eyed stared at me.

Right as I was about to ask Bryce to introduce me to his dog, the phone rang and Bryce left the patio. This time I did not sit on my hands, instead I sprang into action. Taking a meatball from the baggie in my pocket I offered it to the dog. I put it right under his nose. Instead of being nice and gulping down the yummy, from a can, meatball, the dumb mutt woofed at me. It startled me so that I dropped the would-be snack. At the same time the mongrel chomped down on my hand. So there I was, kneeling next to Bryce's couch, with my hand in Bryce's dog's mouth. I really, really did not want Bryce to find me like that.

I tried pulling my hand away but the dog seemed to already have a strategy to deal with that move; he took little, tiny bites. The dog's small top and bottom teeth dug into my flesh. Most dogs can break a Brazil nut with their chompers, and I felt that this dog could do that too, but he seemed satisfied to just clamp down hard enough to hold my hand but not hard enough to break any skin.

Just then my gut percolated. Earlier that day I had a giant bean burrito at The Whole Taco, a Mexican restaurant near my house. The percolating was a fore-bearer to a good-sized expulsion of flatulence. Taking my free hand, I cupped it to my ass, and, you guessed it, I farted. I immediately placed my hand at the dog's nose and opened it up. The air about us got very stuffy, to say the least, and the air cupped in my hand must have been especially pungent because the mutt's eyes all but glazed over. The dog let go of my hand and leaped off the couch. I returned to my seat. Bryce came back. The dog looked woozy and dazed. The meatball lay under the couch, where it had rolled right before the hand chomping thing happened.

Bryce sat down beside me, pulled out joint, and lit it. He took a long draw and passed the weed to me. I took a great big hit only to cough like a tuberculosis patient in the most advanced stages of the disease. Bryce laughed hysterically and patted me on the back. The whole thing was watched carefully by the Spaniel, who seemed to have quickly shaken off the earlier gas-bombing event. Bryce was still laughing when he walked me over to the other side of his yard, where three lawn chairs sat at the far end of a large swimming pool. I peered over his fence and saw that behind us there was nothing more than open space and empty grasslands.

The dog watched us but did not follow. We smoked the rest of the joint. Afterwards I was barely coherent, I was so loaded. I began to tell a story and then, right in the middle of it, I paused, and asked Bryce what I had been talking about. Again he laughed.

I saw that the dog had started to relax. In fact he began ignoring me and instead went over to the couch. Somewhat to my horror, I noticed that the dog was now interested in the meatball, but the snack had rolled deep under the sofa.

"What's you got there, Mono?" Bryce asked. The dog was halfway under the couch by now. Finally the Spaniel had pushed the couch over enough to recover the meatball. He then sat next to the askew couch and chewed and chewed. You'd think I had dropped gum the way that dog chewed. My dog swallowed everything whole in an instant. "What's you got?" Bryce asked again.

"What's your dog's name?" I asked, trying to divert Bryce's attention away from the munching mutt.

"Mono." Bryce said. "Monopoly the Anti-trust, is his name."

"Isn't that an oxymoron?" I asked sweetly enough. The dog had finally swallowed, and then, to my ever growing horror, he began to walk toward Bryce and I.

"No, it's a fucking dog's name, you hump." Bryce said. Mono had made it to us and Bryce tousled his dog's thick fur. "What did you get a hold of?"

"It's a great dog's name," I said in a lame, high-pitched crack-whore-like voice. Then the mutt came to me. He put his head in my lap.

"Hey, he likes you," Bryce said. The dog began sniffing my pants and then he burrowed his nose deep into the pocket of my jeans that held the remaining meatballs. "Boy, you got some kind of scent or something about you," Bryce said. "He never acts like that. He really just doesn't like strangers ever since that cop shot him.

"I got meatballs in my pocket." I said. Don't ask me why, I just blurted that out. Then I thought, 'WHAT DID BRYCE JUST SAY ABOUT BEING SHOT?' But Bryce only laughed.

"Good one," he said, and he laughed a bit more. "I got to make another call." Soon he was off again into his house. This was well before cell phones; my Mono shenanigans would have probably been discovered were Bryce to have owned a mobile phone that he could have used his backyard.

I occupied my time by furiously trying to shove the remaining meatballs down Mono's throat, who by now had become my best friend. I then showed the dog the empty bag. To his credit, the dog got it and stopped sniffing my pockets. By the time Bryce returned Mono was languishing in the sun by my feet and I was the happiest guy in the world.

Bryce sat beside me and Mono in the sun. He brought with him two icy-cold Heinekens as well as a big bag of pretzels. Mono began to nap.

"Okay," Bryce began, "Jimmy filled you in on The Rules, right?"

"Right."

"A person breaks them ONCE with me," Bryce said, "You understand what I mean by that?"

"Yup."

"Okay. My prices always stay the same. Eighty bucks an ounce." Bryce began. "If my price does change I let you know well in advance, and you always hold the old price for a couple of buys. I don't sell less than a half pound." Bryce said. I did the math, that was six-hundred and forty bucks. My heart sank. "But I know you and your 'group' as you like to call them, ain't becoming millionaires at that pie place, so I'll do quarters, just for you. Here's how it works, and ONLY how it works: I call you. I ask if you want to get together. A yes means you can come over, in an hour, and that you have either 320, 640, 960 or 1280 bucks cash in your pocket right at that moment. A non-call means I'm not holding. A no from you means you ain't got the cash or you can't come over in an hour. That's it, got it?" he asked.

"Absolutely." I said.

"And one other thing," Bryce said, "I'm always over, on weight, so that means the more you buy the more you can skim off the top and still have nice fat, over ounces for your friends." My mouth literally began to water.

"I got three-twenty on me now."

"Well then, son," Bryce said, "step over to my office." I also found out one more thing: TRAFFIC. In other words, Bryce wanted none. We had already spent more than an hour at his pool smoking and talking when we made it to his 'office' which was just his bedroom. Then he took his time and spent another good hour going through his stuff and weighing me out my weed. In other, other words, a visit to Bryce's house had to last at least two-and-a-half hours, minimum. I didn't know then how much stress that was going to cause me later, but Bryce had a point—the easiest way for neighbors to spot someone on their block dealing weed is to watch druggie after druggie come and go from a residence. So if you wanted to do business with Bryce, you had to socialize with Bryce, and the deal always came after at least an hour-and-a-half of smoking and talking and snacking. That was the deal and there were no exceptions. You simply never, ever, just visit Bryce and leave right away.

I had a friend that dealt small potatoes, eighths of an ounce for thirty-five bucks a pop, of dirt weed. At his apartment complex a girl was grabbed and almost assaulted, so the local police staked out the place. They eventually found the predator and put him away. Then, they visited my friend. They knocked at his door.

"While watching this building," the cop told my friend, "We noticed that you have a lot of foot traffic, which we think deserves mentioning to the Narcs," the cop said. "You understand what we're saying?" My friend turned bleach white, which of course confirmed their suspicions. I thought they were very cool to give a heads-up to my friend like that. He stopped dealing for a while and then started meeting people at parks and parking lots, which carries its own risks. So I understood what Bryce was doing. I would have to be a friend coming over to visit, and not a customer coming over for a buy. And Bryce mentioned that visits had to be spaced at least a week apart. Like I said, this would create complications for me, later.

But for now, I was in heaven. I was high, it was a warm, slightly blustery, spring day, and I had a great big bag of very good Red-haired-sess buds tucked under my back seat. It was more pot than I had ever possessed at one time. And, to top it off, Bryce and I got along splendidly (and so did me and Mono). Also, the 'overs' thing was no lie, my eyes bulged out at the weights I saw Bryce lay out, each ounce was at least ten-percent over, which meant that I had almost four and a half ounces for my four ounce purchase. I did the numbers in my head, I could move this great weed, at slightly above wholesale cost, and still have almost a half an ounce personal, for free. No wonder, I thought, Jimmy always had weed.

Almost over night, I literally became 'The Man' as I hooked-up all my friends with this stuff. Some I gave out for free. In two days I was out of everything but my personal stash, and I had made a profit, and I had cash again for the next time Bryce called. Like I said, I was in heaven.

I began to hang around the phone a lot. One day I walked in, after classes at school, and was met by my mom.

"Someone named Bryce called," she said. I all but peed my pants—I had missed his call. After two weeks of waiting, I had missed Bryce's call. Then my mom dropped a bomb. "He left his number." I HAD BRYCE'S NUMBER. After only one visit, I had Bryce's personal number. Jimmy had warned me not to even dream about that, but there it was. I was on the phone three seconds later, with my mom standing right there, lording over me, but The Rules now kicked in with great effect.

"Hi Bryce, it's Ash." I said. There was a pause as Bryce asked me a single six-word question.

"Yup," I said. I hung up. I smiled at my mom. It was a huge, Cheshire-cat like ear-to-ear grin. My mom stared at me. 'Go ahead and try and figure it out, mom' I said to myself. Go right ahead and try.

My next visit to Bryce's went pretty much just like the first one, sans the bedroom trust test. We sat by the pool, smoked a joint, talked for an hour over beers, played the hell out of Monopoly-the-Wonder-Anti-Trust-Dog (who I was beginning to fall in love with) and then eventually retired to his room to make the deal. I left with my purchase loosely wrapped in a light jacket we called a 'Hoodie' under my arm. I quickly stashed it beneath my Mustang's back seat and I was off. Over the next week I moved everything to my group, which meant I also did not have foot traffic or strangers around my house. Everything was done in or around the pie place. And I made a profit and I had personal. Life was good.

But with success came problems. Were my parents to find me with hundreds of dollars of weed or cash money, they would in all likelihood turn me over to the cops. So after staring around my room for a long while, I came up with a plan. I walked into my closet. Deep into the closet I turned around. Between the wall to my right and the doorframe was about a foot of drywall. A foot high board ran the length of the wall to my right, put there to support the closet rod on which my clothes hung. I got a saw and a similar board from our garage. I used spare wood to fashion a box about eight inches across, eight inches deep and just as high. Using the saw I carved an eight-by-eight square hole in the drywall inside the closet. I secured the box in the space between the drywall and the inside and outside walls of the closet. I placed a piece of cardboard as a lid for the box. Then I slid a board, which I had painted off-white, in place over the hole. It matched the board holding the clothes rod. So now I had a secret hiding place. To discover my stash of weed and cash, one would have to walk into that small closet, turn around, slide a board away from the box-filled hole, and remove the cardboard cover. I felt my stuff was safe.

The next few buys went just as the first. I wanted everything to go as predictably as possible. Every ten days or so I would meet with Bryce, drink, smoke and wrassle Monopoly all over the back yard. Soon my profits rose to where I was now buying half pounds for six-hundred and forty dollars a pop, and the group was distributing it to their friends, while making a profit for themselves also.

I became a very popular guy. But I also started having problems that The Rules were meant to solve, like people I didn't know coming up to me.

"You the guy with all the drug connections?" asked one dude.

"No, but who told you that?" I asked.

"Christy!" was the answer. So I had a talk with Christy. And I started avoiding people I didn't know, but that didn't keep strangers from coming up to me at parties and trying to talk to me about 'buys'. Does that sound familiar?

Then one day I found myself in a tight spot. It was one thing to brush off a stranger, it was another when it came to our group. To their credit, nobody asked me to introduce them to Bryce. I later found out Jameson TOLD everyone not to even try that. But what did happen was almost as bad, because it involved Mara, my favorite group person in the world.

"Ashyhole," as she addressed me at times, "how ya doing?" I remember she was wearing a tight, black blouse.

"Fine." I said. It made me nervous that Mara was seeking me out, usually I went to her. That's how much Bryce changed things.

"Sweetie," she began, "I need you to talk to Bryce about something." Great, I thought, just great. I held my breath and remained mute. She leaned close. I tried to keep my eyes on hers, and forced myself not to look down, where I might see something I really wanted to see but really didn't want to see. She didn't ever button up her blouses too high, if you know what I mean. "I want some of that fine white powder that Bryce specializes in." And that was that. In a word, I was FUCKED. Weed was one thing, Jimmy green-lighted the weed thing for me, and Bryce took me in, all because of a bean burrito and a meatball. And I NEVER strayed outside of the lines. I had been warned, way back when the whole thing started, that I was a WEED customer. Coke was a whole different ball game. "I want an eight-ball." She added.

I thought back to one time when I went over to Mara's house to sell her a few joints. This was BB, Before Bryce. I sold her three joints for ten bucks. We then retired to her bedroom to smoke another. I was standing besides a tall dresser and I happened to look over at a drawer that was half open. Mara rushed over and slammed the drawer shut.

"Nudie pictures," she said. I looked at the closed drawer.

"Of you?"

"No, of my dog... retard," she said.

"Can I see them?" I asked.

"No you can't see them, you pervert."

"Just because I want to see them, I'm a pervert?"

"Yes, we're not in a relationship. We're friends, not lovers," she said. "You shouldn't want to see them."

"You don't know much about guys," I mumbled. That got me a punch in the ribs—a hard punch. Later, as I was leaving, I abruptly turned and kissed her. She froze like stone, but otherwise didn't react. She didn't spread that around, either; she just pretended it never happened. I felt like the biggest tool ever. I was such an ass, that night, so clueless about boundaries that I probably should have been locked up and kept away from people, at least until I had evolved a bit. Later, when we bumped into each other, she accused me of ripping her off by selling her three dirt weed joints for ten bucks. I offered her money back but told her, in my defense, that I had the shittiest contacts in the world and wasn't exactly getting great deals myself. To her credit, she apologized, which made me want to hug her. It was this that made me so damn eager to be Bryce's best friend. To tell the truth, I wanted to be popular and cool, especially in front of her. Anyway, now she was an inch from my face, asking a favor. She had a sweet, musky smell.

"I'll ask," I muttered meekly, "but I can't promise you anything." To be frank, I had a huge crush on that girl, even as out-of-my-league as she was. She had dirty-blonde hair, a rock-hard body she wasn't afraid to show off, and a cool sounding voice. The actor Morgan Freeman is very, very talented, but I don't think he would have gotten half the roles offered to him were it not for his fantastic, rich, voice. A woman had to train Clark Gable to pitch his voice lower to sound sexier, or so I read somewhere. Well, Mara's voice was slightly deep, silky and sultry. The combo of all these gifts made her the hottest woman I had ever personally known.

Then came the call from Bryce—I generally let him contact me, and only used his number if I missed his call. Soon I was over at his house, harassing the heck out of his dog while Bryce looked on and laughed. I could even get Mono to jump into the pool, because I always brought a snack for him and he would follow me everywhere, even into the water, to get it. Jeeze, Bryce had one cool dog. After an hour, as usual, we retired to Bryce's bedroom-slash-office.

"What's your poison?" Bryce asked.

"Half," I said. Then I took a deep breath and added, "and an eight-ball." Bryce froze, and looked at me. My heart sank, and sank, and sank.

"Ash?" Bryce asked. I stared down at my shoes. "That's why you've been acting weird today. Even Mono could tell something was up." When I didn't say anything Bryce continued. "You are my favorite contact. You follow The Rules better than anyone. I know you even added some of your own, like you never call me when you're drinking or high. How can someone who makes them a religion set them aside just like that?" Now I was all but weeping. "Weed in California, even in distribution amounts is one thing, especially for a first time offender. But coke is prison, and you know that, so what's up?" I bunched my lips together because I was literally too choked up to speak I actually wondered if I would ever see Mono again, that's how strongly negative Bryce's reaction was. "It's that wild bitch, isn't it? Yup, you don't use that shit, but she sure as hell does." Bryce said. He was sitting on his bed facing me. He had long ago stopped weighing out the half-pound of herb. "Did you know she just got a ticket going over a hundred in that Porsche of hers? That's right, remember that story you told me of Big Sur? She used to have better defined boundaries, but she is getting more and more crazy these days." Bryce picked at a weave bracelet he wore and continued. "Did you know she's driving down to the clubs in Hollywood every weekend? Nothing good happens in the middle of the night down there, kid." Finally I looked at Bryce.

"I kind of love her," I said in a quiet voice. "She asked me to ask you, so I did." That's all I said. Then I stared at my shoes again. To my surprise, Bryce laughed.

"You poor son-of-a-bitch," he said. Then, to my even bigger surprise, he went back to being the same old Bryce, measuring out bud, cutting off all the stems, and raving about how terrific Creedence Clearwater and The Grateful Dead were as trailblazing bands. He gave me my weed. Then he turned toward a drawer, that was locked, in his dresser. He pulled out a baggie of white powder and gave it me. It looked like it held about three or four grams. I gave him the cash, in exact change. Somehow Mara had known how much Bryce charged for that amount of coke, to the penny. I sure didn't. And that was that. Bryce didn't bring it up again—he didn't lecture or even warn me—he didn't have too, I knew what I was doing, or so I thought. We just kicked back some more, played with Mono and then with a pat on my back, he saw me off.

"I GOT READ THE FUCKING RIOT ACT FOR THIS SHIT," I all but screamed at Mara. It was the first time I ever even remotely raised my voice to her.

She invited me to her house the second I called her. On the drive over I began to suspect that maybe Bryce and her had a past that I didn't know about and that they didn't talk about. I handed over the baggie while wondering just how much she liked that stuff. She grabbed it and quick as lightening, made it disappear (it was usually customary to share a little bit of shit like that with the person who took the time and trouble to procure it).

"Thank you Stinkerbutt," she said. She ruffled my hair and gave me a light kiss with her perfect, sweet, glossy lips. "Thank you," she whispered. And that was why I did it, and that's what that was all about, and that's what I wanted.

One day they all ganged up on me—it was March 1st, 1982. Bobby's parents were out of town on vacation, and would be the entire week, so my gang, and their friends, and even some strangers, all got together and came up with a plan, and then they cornered me. To make everything just perfect, they picked Mara to do their dirty work as spokeswoman.

"When was the last time you talked to Bryce, Ashyhole?" she asked.

"I don't know any Bryce," I said.

"Ash..." she drew my name out long, like it was spelled with three H's at the end or something.

"Nope, don't know any... what did you say his name was... Rice? Bright?"

"Ash... when was the last time?" We were at work, she in her tight waitress uniform (better tips that way) and me all but pushed against the big, green, oily dumpster we had outside the back door. Her cohorts lingered about or popped their heads out the door, now and then. One head-popper even asked 'did he say yes?' and was quickly shushed away.

"A week, maybe," I said.

"Perfect," she said with a huge smile. "When your loverboy calls you, ask him for a little more time."

"Nope. I say yes or no."

"This time you will say exactly what I tell you to say, Sweetie," she said. She got real close. No girl ever accidentally brushes her boobs against you.

"Which is what?"

"These exact words, and there're not really breaking The Rules... ready?"

"What are they?"

"YES, IN TWO HOURS." Mara said.

"What's the extra hour for?"

"We need time to get ready." She said. Her top was made of white cotton. It had a ruffle around the neckline. "After you hang up you call me, right away." Her uniform blouse looked like it had been washed about a thousand times. It was thin enough to see the stitching on her bra. Then and there, I decided I was going to try and become a homosexual.

"Then what?"

"We all meet at Bobby's house."

"Who's this ALL?" I asked.

"The group," she said, "and a couple friends of the group."

"Just the group." I said. I was beginning to wonder why I liked this girl so much.

"Don't worry, I'll handle everything." Mara said. "We're going to have a party and we want more than just six people there, but you won't have to worry about dealing with anyone but me. Cool?"

She told me her and her coconspirator's plan. It went like this: I was to call Mara immediately after Bryce called me and then I was to go over to Bobby's house and wait. Mara was to call all her friends, which from that night on would be ready, at a moment's notice, to jet over to Bobby's parent-less house. Everyone was to bring as much cash as they could beg, borrow or steal. Then we would all meet and Mara would make a shopping list for me to order from Bryce.

"I don't know," I said.

"It's going to be fine, Sweetie," she said. "Don't you think a party, where your big-man-on-campus thing can make you look super cool, in front of everybody, would be fun?" Mara asked. "There'll be lots of girls there... including me."

DO IT! DO IT! DO IT! My smaller head began screaming at me. DOOOO IT! I knew she was playing me, she knew she was playing me, I knew I would never get into her pants, she knew I would never get into her pants, but I really didn't care at that point about facts, reality or anything. What I cared about was my fantasy woman, MARA.

"Okay," I said. Mara gave me a big smile and a hug. She turned and gave a thumbs-up to the loitering crowd smoking in the dark alleyway, who all nodded back and then filed into the pie place or just faded away. She then went back to waitressing and ignored me the rest of the night.

It was March 5th, 1982. I saw the morning break cold and misty, but watched it clear up to become a mild, sunny afternoon. It was one-thirty in the afternoon.

"Do you want to hang out?" I asked.

"Bryce called? Bryce called?" Mara asked.

"You are supposed to only say yes or no," I said.

"YES." And, as they say, that was that.

Ten minutes later I was at Bobby's house. It was a single story generic-type of abode that filled most of the suburbs of Orange County. It had groomed hedges and a nice lawn and sat at the very end of a cul-de-sac.

People began arriving. I'll say this for Mara, she had hot friends. They were the tanned, hippie-necklace wearing, sort of preppie-slash-disco type of crowd, that dressed down but drove nice cars. I loitered in the kitchen with a beer while people gathered in Bobby's living room. They all seemed to know each other. A few of the group arrived, Anthony, Jameson, Becky and Tommy showed. Of course, Bobby was there, so I was never alone with just strangers.

Mara arrived and parked her Porsche on Bobby's lawn. I was rather alarmed to see the entire end of the street filled with cars. Our shindig was not going to go unnoticed by the neighbors. That was kind of Red Flag Number One.

By two in the afternoon we had twenty-three people under Bobby's roof. They were beginning to party and have fun. The noise level began to rise. That turned out to be Red Flag Number Two.

Mara gathered everyone around the living room's big glass coffee table. For some reason Bobby's parent's had a coffee table that was huge. Maybe they just liked 50,000 piece puzzles, I thought. She began taking orders. It wasn't just the quantities that they began listing, but also what they were ordering. Weed, coke, mushrooms and LSD were mentioned. Someone brought up Meth. I sent Bobby in with a message for Mara.

"Coke and weed only," she announced to the crowd. Ten minutes after that she was in the kitchen with me.

"Here's our list." She said. "Three eight-balls, one and a half pounds of weed, and three ounces of magic mushrooms."

"I said weed and coke only."

"Bryce does mushrooms!" Mara said. She looked amped up. "He does!" Mara looked really high. We hadn't even really started partying and yet Mara's pupils were as big as coffee cup saucers. I hadn't seen her like that before. She was different among these other people. She seemed, as had Bryce mentioned, wilder. There in front of me, with lots of cleavage, was big 'ol Red Flag Number Three.

I sighed. "The money?" I asked. Mara gave me a big stack of bills. I began counting it. Two-thousand, nine-hundred and sixty dollars, in good old US Greenbacks lay in my sweaty hand. I tried to get the bills in my jean pocket but they wouldn't fit.

"MARA!" I said. It was a whispered shout.

"Everything's cool!" She said. "Wait!" She left and returned with a big knapsack.

"There's stuff in here," I said. So she dumps everything on the kitchen counter with a fury. I counted three hacky-sacks among the junk. That was sort of Red Flag Number Four. I hate hacky-sacks and fury.

Soon I was off. It took a glaring hate-filled look to Mara to get a few real determined hanger-on-ers that were insisting they be let to ride shotgun in my Mustang, to Bryce's place. She corralled them all back to the house and I drove off with the knapsack and almost three thousand dollars of other people's money. Red Flag Número Cinco.

I pulled up to Bryce's house. He met me at the door. He didn't look all that happy.

"What was the extra hour for?" he asked, first thing. Bryce didn't exactly ask it mean like, but he did ask the question like he really wanted to know my answer right off.

"Mara had this big fucking idea that she would get her friends together for a big buy." I said. I said it all fast like it was one big run-on sentence. Mono came over, wagging his tail. In the confusion, I had forgot his snack. I was beginning to get depressed, because Bryce still had this serious look on his face.

"Let's see the cash," Bryce said. I pulled the stack out of the knapsack. It was a huge mishmash of fifties, twenties, fives and even some ones. They were all rumpled up, because Mara had shoved them into the bag all manic-like.

I noticed that we had broke our pattern—Bryce and I were talking business from minute one, right there in the hallway.

"What's the buy?" Bryce asked.

"One and a half weed, three eighths coke, and three grams of mushrooms." I looked at Bryce. I was never so grateful in my life to hear someone laugh. He busted up.

"Kid, that girl is dynamite. Real fucking dynamite." He put his arm around me. We walked a little and I watched him toss the knapsack with the money in it into his room. It landed on the bed. We went out to the back yard. "The trouble with dynamite is that it's as likely as not to blow up in your face."

"Yup." I said. "Can I ask you a big favor?"

"I don't see why not," Bryce answered. "It seems like a 'Do Ash lots of Favors... kind of day.'"

"Do you have anything I can give Anti-trust? I forgot his snack." Bryce laughed.

"Didn't bring any Chef Boy-O-Boy meatballs like you did the first time we met here?" he said. I laughed but my brain started to run on overdrive. How exactly did Bryce know that?

He led me to the yard and disappeared. He came back with two Beck's beers and a hot dog, Mono's favorite snack. He lit a joint as I fed Mono little pieces of the hot dog. Mono was the strangest dog, he had to sniff and examine every piece of food, like as if someone had tried to poison him once.

Bryce and I got high, drank a few beers and talked a lot about mundane stuff like music and cats and stuff. Bryce didn't like cats but loved music. The whole thing got me to relax. I started playing with Mono. I would lightly slap the side of his face and he would try to snap his yellow teeth over my fingers. Every once in a while he would catch me, and without any gut percolation weapons, my only option was to drag my hand out of his mouth as he took tiny little bites. It hurt like a son-of-a-bitch when he did that, especially when he got to the very end of the fingertips and pinched the last tiny bit of skin in his small front teeth.

"Yikes!" I said, shaking my hand.

"You're the only one he plays like that with," Bryce said. "Anybody else tries that they get bit for real." I finally wore Anti-trust out and he flopped down in the cool grass. I laid next to him and just stared up at the puffy white clouds in the sky.

"I'm just going to lay here the rest of my life," I said, "if that's okay with you, Bryce."

Following our regular routine, we eventually retired to Bryce's office. He counted out the money.

"You're fifty short, dude." I looked all through that shitty bag, but since I was stoned I just kept going through the same empty pockets over and over.

"I counted it," I muttered to myself, "It was all here."

"Check your pockets," Bob said. And there it was. I figured that when I tried to fit the wad in my jeans Mara and I missed that fifty, and it never got into the bag. But I cursed myself for looking like I was trying to rip off Bryce. He shook my apology off.

"It's been that kind of day for me too, kid," was what he said. "Earlier I had a no-show and a rabbit ate up our garden last night."

"Do you grow this stuff yourself?" I blurted out. I usually never ask Bryce questions.

"No," he said with a laugh. He looked at me for a second and then rose from the bed. "Be right back." Bryce came back with a garbage bag. It was a large lawn-and-leaf bag like the kind you can line a regular-sized trash can with. It was almost full of weed.

"What da ya think?" he asked.

"Holy crap!" I said. I guessed there could have been ten thousand dollars of moveable bud in that bag. "Holy crap!" I said again.

"I get it straight off a plane in the middle of the desert, on BLM lands."

"Holy crap!" Was all I could say. Bryce laughed. He finished the order and we loaded the knapsack full to the top, which began to bulge like a pregnant woman in the last days of her third trimester.

Driving down a palm tree lined boulevard I heard something on the radio. I turned up the volume, hoping that what I heard was wrong, but there it was. At age thirty-three the American comedian of Albanian descent was on top of the world. He had a number one rated late night television show* a number one rated record album* and a number one rated movie* on his resume. But that day, March, 5th, 1982, John Adam Belushi was found dead in a bungalow off Sunset Boulevard. He died, the radio news report said, of a drug overdose. I remember that day like it was yesterday—It was clear and sunny—what I thought was a bad day to go out on. I shook my head.

How could, I wondered to myself, someone so young with so much promise, I wondered, get so off track? Then I looked in my rear-view mirror. In the black-and-white car behind me were two cops. In my mirror it looked like I was being followed by Adam-Twelve, the television cop car with that number. I averted my eyes when I realized I was staring at them. My heart began pounding in my chest and I started to sweat. After five minutes I glanced back, and saw that police cruiser was still following me. Then I happened to look down. The knapsack was bulging, in clear view, half in and half out from under my back seat. HOW COULD ANYONE GET SO OFF TRACK, I asked myself.

*Saturday Night Live *The Blues Brothers *Animal House

I turned off the boulevard and watched as the cops kept going. I breathed a huge sigh of relief. I shook my head. How did I become a drug dealer, I wondered? But I shook it off. I said to myself that some people had good luck and that some people had bad and I, at present time, had just good luck.

I still had a lot to do. At ten-percent over I had a lot of weed to break out of that knapsack, BEFORE I reached Bobby's house. Also, an eight-ball was an eighth of an ounce (three and a half grams) of coke, which Bryce always rounded out to four. So I had one and a half grams coming to me, there. But I couldn't go home and I couldn't go to Bobby's, just yet. I drove by a park but knew the cops cruised those types of areas too frequently. In the end I decided to just pull over in a quiet residential neighborhood, and do some rough-justice-weight-guessing weed and coke removal surgery. I ignored the mushrooms. I stashed my cut away and drove to Bobby's.

Now came Red Flag Number Six. There were people on the street waiting for me (instead of out-of-sight in the house). I glanced at my watch: it was five-forty in the evening. Most of the people there had been waiting over three hours for me. I parked, grabbed the knapsack and got out of the Mustang. People were giving me mad-dog stares as I walked buy. A small crowd followed me into the house. To say the least everybody was pissed.

I was kind of amused, actually, because I knew what was going to happen next. I was very lean on my cut, so when I, all dramatic like, poured everything onto the coffee table everyone gasped. The amounts were staggering. All of a sudden everyone was all smiles. Mara rushed forward with a scale. Somebody grabbed baggies from Bobby's kitchen and everybody went to work. First they divided up the weed, weighed it, bagged it, and distributed it. Joints began to light up all around the house—everyone all of a sudden was weed rich.

I grabbed a beer and plopped down in a big easy chair. Even though there were twenty-three people in Bobby's living room there were plenty of open chairs because everyone was drooling over the drugs on the table. They weighed out the coke and passed that around. Three guys and a girl split the shrooms. After everything was in everyone's pocket some people split, but most hung around. Now that the business was done the party started in earnest. Bobby came over with a big grin and a lit joint that I waved off. Bryce's personal shit was way better that what he distributed and I wanted to cruise along with its buzz unpolluted. I was chatting with Bobby and a girl named Stella when I started to notice something.

"What's eating you, Ash?" Bobby asked. "I mean besides the fact that Mara didn't mention to her new crew anything about Bryce's rules, and that the deal would take a few hours." I cringed at the word 'Deal' and the mention of Bryce's name. But I ignored the red flags that just seemed to be popping up everywhere.

"Count the people in this room."

"Eight." Bobby said. "So... some people left."

"I know, but there should be about fifteen or so people still here."

"So?"

"You know anything about coke?" I asked.

"What do you mean?" Bobby asked.

"Did you notice what happened with the weed?"

"People smoked it?" piped in our new friend, Stella.

"Yeah, exactly." I said. "What happened with the coke?"

"It disappeared."

"Exactly," I said. "You can see people rolling joints, even cleaning their weed of the few stems that Bryce missed. But coke..." I began, but stopped when I caught sight of Mara. She was poking her head out from the hallway. When she saw she had my attention, she hooked her finger toward me. I saw her mouth the words 'come here'. Then I saw her put her fingers to her lips like it was a big secret. Excusing myself, I met her in the hall that led to the bedrooms. Mara grabbed my shirt and pulled me into Bobby's parent's master bedroom. And there, folks, as you can guess, was where the coke had walked off too. Bobby's parent's mirrors, of every kind, were being passed around. I saw that the only person from our group in the room was Jameson, though he didn't look like he was doing lines. He was just talking to a girl. Mara, all sneaky-like pushed me into the room, and, with her back to the door, locked it.

"Everybody," she announced, "This is ASH." I was met, hugged, even kissed by half the people in that room. Bryce's coke was of a quality few ever see. He doesn't need to cut it. Basically Bryce prides himself on astounding people with his quality of merchandise. He gets a kick out of being the best. And his connections were so far up the food chain that their stuff was untouchable. I got passed a line. Ignoring my earlier edict to keep Bryce's buzz pure, I did it. The whole room started to buzz with an energy that was something akin to great sex. All of a sudden everyone became great friends and Chatty-Cathy's.

"Great stuff Ash," a guy named Marcus said to me. "And I really know my shit. Ask anyone here." Marcus had curly permed-like hair and was wearing a white t-shirt, jeans and had a gold chain around his neck. He had an earring. "Are Bryce's connections with the Mafia?" I shot Mara a look. To her credit she came and rescued me.

"Marcus," she said "don't Bogart Ash, Ash come meet some more of my peeps." Yes, she said PEEPs. And yes, that dude used Bryce's name. And yes, people were asking the WRONG questions. THE VERY, VERY, WRONG QUESTIONS. The buzz began to sour. The people in the room began to look like vampires to me, I kid you not. They were nice, good-looking but somehow off or not real, maybe, I thought, even sinister. And I was swimming in a sea of red flags. I was about to have a 'talk' with Mara when we heard a knock at the door. Everybody ignore it but some hid their mirrors.

"Hey, what's going on in there?" someone said, outside the door, you know, where the loser, weed-only people got to hang out.

"IS THERE A GIRL NAMED BARBARA IN THERE?" someone else said in a loud voice. Yup, in Bobby's parent's bedroom were coke people and some of the weed people's GIRLFRIENDS. I began to laugh. I glared at the coke people's door guard and he moved. I opened the door.

"COME ON IN." I shouted. "HEY, WE'RE ALL DOING COKE, ANYBODY WANT COKE?" Well, of course that didn't make me too popular and Bobby's parent's bedroom started to become very crowded. I locked eyes with Jameson. Bobby, part of the weed-only crowd, shouldered his way into the room, but I pulled him out. The three of us gathered in the hall just outside the room.

"You fine with this, Bobby?" I asked.

"No." he said. "I want to play quarters with the group. I don't want to steal away with coke-heads who just want to bullshit all night."

"Jameson, can you get these people out of here?" I asked. Jameson seemed to think for a minute, and nodded.

"Folks," Jameson said while holding his hands high. "We just got a call from Bobby's parents. They're on their way home from the airport. Weather problems made them cut their trip short. And..." Jameson continued, "since Bobby's dad is a City of Orange police officer, we should probably all clear out."

No crowd control was ever more effective. You'd have thought there was a fire. Mara, who knew Bobby's dad was a general contractor, left with the rest of the coke vampires, but as she passed me she spoke.

"Dickhead..." was all she said.

One day I realized that I hadn't heard from Bryce in almost a month. I called and called but no one ever answered. I knew he had a private phone in his room for business, but I had never asked what the number of the house phone was. Finally, slightly alarmed, I decided that The Rules didn't apply in my situation so I drove over to his house unannounced. I have to admit I was as nervous as hell when I knocked on his door, but I had become all but obsessed with making sure Bryce (and Anti-trust) were okay.

Bryce's mother opened the door. She was a diminutive, wrinkly prune of a woman of German descent. When she spoke she did it through a thick, humorless German accent. My own mother is also of German descent, but through years of patience and hard work she virtually lost her Prussian twang. Many of her acquaintances didn't even know that she had spent the first twenty years of her life growing up in Deutschland, land of Benz's and BMW's. Bryce's mom, however, had a thicker accent than Arnold Schwarzenegger (I know, he's Austrian, but you get my point). She frowned and fixed an icy stare at me.

"Hi." I said, all sweet and innocent like. "I'm a friend of Bryce's."

"You're Bryce's CLIENT," she said, "not friend. Go away and don't come back." She began to close the door when I heard her curse and look down. She had to jump back. She was easily pushed aside by a large, yellow-toothed Springer Spaniel.

"Mono." I said over and over as I ruffled his thick fur. Being the eternal optimist that I am, I had a baggie-encased hot dog in my pocket. I hugged him, and while feeding him little bits of the hot dog (of course he had to sniff each piece for what seemed like an eternity) I kissed the top of his head. All the while I was acutely aware that Fräu-Bryce's-Mom was staring intensely at us.

"I'll be damned," said the lady from the land of knockwurst and Volkswagens and lederhosen. "You must be Ash."

"That's right, that's right," I said twice. Seeing Anti-trust made my heart soar. He was healthy but tired looking. Seeing Wonderdog was like getting high, he literally gave me a buzz. It was hard keeping my hands off him, I liked that sugar so much. AND, he acted like he was especially glad to see me. His tail was going a mile a minute, and as an added bonus, it kept hitting Fräu Goebbels. I looked at the lady at the door and saw only a bottomless pit of bitterness.

"Come in, Ash." When she said my name it sounded like Ass, and I really didn't think it was because of her über thick accent. We sat on the couch in the living room, and even though I'd been over to Bryce's house a million times, it was the first time I ever sat on that sofa in the living room. It looked like it had never been used.

"Something happened," Bryce's mom said. Anti-trust settled at my feet, actually, on them. I pulled my feet away, said to myself, troll-lady go to hell, and pulled the shoes off my stinky, smelly feet. I slid them back under Mono. It was a routine I had done a dozen times before. Anti went right to sleep, and oh yeah, in case I haven't mentioned it before, besides farting, Mono snores. LOUD. That seemed to irritate the Bratwurst lady and she shot the dog a hard glance, and then turned to me.

"We don't know how," she said, "but the government found out about Bryce's assets." (He had bought a house). A bad smell began to fill the room and again she looked hard at Anti-trust. "The IRS sent Bryce a letter. They wanted to know how a man who had been unemployed for ten years had amassed almost a half a million dollars. Bryce wasn't a total idiot, he didn't keep it in the bank or anything, but, anyway, they found him out." She frowned again when another round of smells, this time more pungent, filled the room (this time it wasn't Mono, but I waved my hand above Wonderdog to absolve me of blame). "They really went after him because he hadn't filed a single return in the past decade. He had to cut a deal. He gave them all his money and will be in a Federal Prison for about five years."

"I'm sorry."

"Yeah... I bet you are," she said sweetly. "You can't smoke or snort your drugs now, heh?" I just petted Mono and hoped his and my flatulence would still fill the room. It gave me something to think about besides bad news and German fräuleins. And, I was really, really tired of trying to look upon the woman before me without frowning, screaming or vomiting. "Everyone thought Bryce was soooo smart, sooo coool," Gollum continued, "But anyone dealing that SHIT is stupid, period." I just stared at Momo and stroked his fur. "You know what the worst part is?" I quickly decided that that was a trick question and remained mute. "Did you know Bryce was in the Air Force for twelve years?"

"He was a mechanic." I said. "He worked on jets."

"Damn right." She said. "He could have made something of his life." She looked at me real hard, as if deciding something. "Bryce trusted you so I'll tell you something. You know those drugs? You know where they came from or how much he was moving and why?" I looked around. I decided to jump in.

"He had a contract with..." I paused, and then continued. "Some people." I whispered it. She whispered back.

"Yeah, you know who." She said. You're smart not to even mention their name. I know now why Bryce trusted you."

"He moved about ten-grand a month."

"That's a conservative estimate, but not far off." She said. She lit a cigarette. "They wouldn't let him out. He was theirs, period, you understand?" She again stared at me like all this was my fault. "They have to let him go now, though, he has Uncle Sam's eye on him, now. And since he wasn't arrested for drugs, and since he didn't roll over on anybody, he should survive his term. He can start fresh, after a few years. Bryce can get a job fixing planes, and after the time he will spend in the Big House, he will be able piss a clean test." I all but laughed at her term the Big House but I had to admit she was making sense. Bryce had whispered so much to me once or twice. He didn't make it sound serious; he said he would be out once he trained a successor. Of course, I all but shit my pants when, during the same conversation, he asked me if I wanted to meet his boss.

"Now" continued Bryce's mom, "my biggest problem is what to do with this idiot mutt that he trained to bite every hand that comes near it."

Mono drooled the whole way home to my parent's house. He sat in my lap and was antsy, nervous and generally neurotic, all the time clawing around, but we made it to the Fullerton abode without incident. Turns out Mono doesn't do car travel. In fact it really freaks him out, but I felt like he seemed to know that change was necessary, even essential, and he put up with it (while only biting me once, and that wasn't really too hard).

My biggest fear was snowball. She was as neurotic a dog as Anti-trust—she seemed to cringe at every new thing—and here I was bringing Mono-the-Biting-Machine-Anti-trust into her territory. Snowball was called just that because she was just that, a giant snowball. American Eskimo dogs are smaller versions of their big Nordic cousins, the Samoyed. They basically are just huge balls of bright white fur with a piece of coal for a nose and a little pink tongue that licks everything.

To my unending relief and to my absolute gratitude to God, (who may or may not exist) Mono and Snowball sniffed each other and, after circling a bit, became best of friends. Mono became Snowball's big, protective, MMA brother. Snowball was so sensitive that even a rough rustling of her fur made her yelp. But God help you if she yelped Post-Mono. Boy, that yellow-toothed biting machine was in your face and ready for business before Snowball took her next breath, I kid you not.

My heart absolutely soared when Mono lost that tired look. The fact was that Anti-trust didn't like change either. But there he was, around a woman (when she would talk on the phone back to the homeland) who spoke German (just like you-know-nasty-who) and who had a big back yard (like Bryce), and who had a pool (albeit smaller than Bryce's) and who had a suburban, single-story house with a refrigerator-freezer filled with hot dogs, (just like in Anaheim Hills, though maybe with less property value) and who had a friend, protector, and a person who genuinely loved him, me (just like Bryce... who would be away for a couple of years) and who had met a new friend, a big puffed piece of cotton, Snowball, who was as smart as, well, a snowball.

Mono was smart, if not neurotic, and Snowy seemed to notice, because if Anti-trust did something, so did she. Snow used to swallow everything whole (I even got her to gulp down a Brussels sprout by tossing it in-between pieces of meat that I fed her in a big, thrown arc) but after Mono she actually began to sniff her food first. THEN she swallowed it whole, of course. I put that down to habit or genetics or just plain Snowball stupidity-stubbornness-food-addict-ness.

I was also very relieved. My big-man-on-campus thingy was growing old and I was, believe it or not, ready to give up on weed as a fix for my not wanting to deal with life. I would, however, find a substitute. THAT, racing fans, is the story coming up next, so you may want to throw this tome away, NOW.

Mono lived at my parent's home for over ten years. Even after I had long moved out I still visited that dog and fed him snacks, although something about that DID change. Now I had to bring TWO hot dogs (or jerky or beef sticks), one for Anti-trust and one for Snowy. Once I tried to bring only one hot dog, to split for the two of them, and, like I said, I ONLY TRIED THAT ONCE, damn... those yellow teeth are sharp.

Then one day my mom called me at my apartment.

"Drop by," was all she said, in a perfect Southern California accent. My mom did not put up with shit, she did not answer questions nor did she entertain the fancy of those she thought she had business with. So, I got no answers over the phone and drove to that house in Fullerton, which began to look pretty sweet as the property values in California started to skyrocket, at that time.

I had planned to say 'What's upppp?' all cool like but Anti-trust met me at the door, so I got down to business.

I had my hot dog ready. I pulled off little pieces and Mono took them. I looked over his shoulder and saw my parents. They were looking at me with an intensity that I had never seen before. I was curiously amused. I wondered, as I saw my parents watching us, if Mono had finally decided to chomp on one of their hands and that, as his non-legal guardian, I was being called upon to do damage control. I silently laughed at my mom and dad for their thin-skinned-dog-ness (my dad, after all, had been to Vietnam, and my mom had survived just about everything). Then I looked down. On the floor were all the pieces of hot dog that I had fed to Anti-trust just moments before. He had taken them into his mouth, like as before, but unlike as before, he now dropped them instead of swallowing them. Then, I petted Monopoly-the-Anti-Trust. I can only barely describe this... my hand rolled over a fur-covered skeleton. There it was.

My dad told me the vet said that there was nothing they could do, that Mono was just real old. He, to my unending gratitude, declined the option the vet gave him.

I spent the next few days with Anti-trust; I told my work (I was in printing by then) and anyone who asked, that I was nursing a sick family member, which was the absolute truth. Three nights later, Anti curled into a ball and went to sleep, right next to me.

Well. Morning next. Dogs don't live as long as humans, and that, as they say, is that. Mono lived every single day, with the exception of about two weeks, happy, healthy, and enjoying life. My parents never, in ten years, had to take that guy to the vet, before his time ran out. Well, that morning I stroked my hand across a solid, rock-hard, curled up, non-Mono.

I wept the whole day. I wept and I wept and I wept until my Sarge-dad physically shook me and shouted in my face to move on, which I did, which you have to do.

But I will tell you this. Bryce had one super fabulous dog.

I won't tell you what I'm doing while writing this; it's none of your business. I will say that I will have to clean my keyboard if I want to continue with this silly tome. But Bryce did have one awesome stinkybutt-hot-dog-loving-bite-prone-friend, and so did I.

Chapter 5

The group dissolved almost over night. The fact was that we were never really a group at all, we were just a bunch of half-grown adults that wanted to get high, and we did just that around other people that wanted to get loaded too.

Jameson took a job at a famous restaurant as an understudy to a well-known chef. These days he's just as highly regarded as anyone in the business. After that nasty party Mara stopped talking to us and even parked her car in a different spot. (She told a friend that someone had scratched it.) Sometime later she crashed her Porsche driving over one-hundred miles per hour. She almost died. After that she cleaned herself up and became a real estate agent in Laguna Beach, a trendy popular artist's (back then) community. She became very wealthy. I only saw her one more time, and that experience was not pleasant.

Becky moved to Colorado, to attend beauty school there, and why she had to move out of state, nobody knew.

Anthony finished vocational school and became a mechanic. He eventually started his own business in the car repair field. I never saw Bryce ever again, nor did I want to; I lived in fear that one day he would show up and want his dog back, but that never happened. Bobby all but dropped out, he quit his job and disappeared.

Everyone else moved on. I still saw Christy some, but I could tell that that relationship was doomed, we didn't even really like each other. But for a while, we still hooked-up now and then, as the kids these days put it.

One day while Christy and I were dressing after doing our thing, she turned to me and gave me a big hug.

"Did you want to go on a double-date?" she asked.

"No," I said.

"Would you think about it?"

"No, I said.

"You could invite you friend Tommy and I could bring Linder,"

"No," I said.

"Did you want to ask Tommy?"

"No." I said.

"I could make it worth your while..." Christy said.

"How?" I asked.

"We could do something."

"We already do everything."

"We haven't done this," she said. She came close and whispered in my ear.

"Could we do that now?" I asked.

"Yes," Christy said. She said it all coy like, dragging out the 's' like all of a sudden she was shy. I tell you, I've been around some slutty chicks in my day but Christy made debauchery an art form.

I haven't mentioned Tommy much because I really didn't like him much. It wasn't a big thing; it was just that not everybody connects with everybody else. About all I could say about Tom was that he was very handsome. But that was about all the good I could say about him.

On the other side he could be petty and venal. If you got an order of his wrong (he was a waiter) and he thought you may have cost him some tip money, he snapped at you. Also, he was one of those people that thought no bad situation was ever his fault, it was always yours. But I promised Christy (who liked Tommy) I'd ask.

I found Tommy dressing in the locker room. He was carefully grooming his hair.

"Tommy," I said, "you remember Christy?"

"That brainless skank you hang around with?" he asked.

"She wants to double-date, along with her friend Linder Jamne."

"Who's the victim?"

"I was hoping you could come along," I said. "I'll drive and buy..."

"No way, Ash." Tommy said. "No frigg'n way, dude."

"It would just be one night," I said, "it could be fun."

"Nope." Tom said. "Like hangs around like—I don't need a date with a ditzy moron—that's your deal, not mine."

"I would be just for grins..."

"No, no, and no." Tom said. He fixed his tie and turned to leave. "Not now, not later, and not ever. Don't ask me again."

I had asked. I gave it a try, with not-so-great results. I decided it was a lost cause. I also decided that Tommy was nothing more than a shallow idiot. I worked the rest of my shift in a dark mood. It wasn't just that I was going to disappoint Christy, I was pretty sure she was used to that, it was that Tommy wouldn't do me a favor that would be no big deal to almost anybody else. For a while I thought about other friends that I could bring along, but in the end I decided that whoever Linder was, she would have to find her own dates.

The following day, I showed up for my shift, and Tom came right over to me.

"Dude," Tommy began, he was all of a sudden my best friend, smiling and slapping my shoulder. "I'm in. Have Christy arrange the double-date."

"Huh, huh," I said, pulling away from him. "But I sort of understood what no, not now, no, not ever, meant. Go screw yourself."

"Hey, man, don't be like that," Tom said. "We'll have fun."

"What's with the big change of heart?"

"I know who she is," Tommy said. "I looked her up in my yearbook. Just last week she and Christy and their parents were at Mickey's Pizza when Joe and I were there. I'm in, let's double-date."

"The thing is," I said, "you seemed pretty clear about what no, no, no and don't ask me again, meant to you and me when all I wanted was a little fucking favor." I decided that Tom was a big dickhead. You, know, the same thing Mara thought I was. I also began to wonder why he was suddenly so hot to go out with Christy's friend.

"Come on, dude!" Tom said. I had expected him to walk away, but there he was, still in my face. I REALLY began to wonder what exactly he saw in his yearbook. Tom spread his hands out wide before me. "Dude, I was in a bad mood yesterday, that's all. Let's go on the date and have fun."

"Do the Chicken Dance."

"What?"

"Just like you yesterday, I'm in a bad mood today." I said. I was actually beginning to enjoy myself just then. "I think the Chicken Dance would cheer me up."

"Dude..."

"Don't worry about it then," I said. To my amazement, a moment later, there in the locker room, Tom began it. He hopped up and down on one leg and with his thumbs tucked firmly in his armpits. He flapped his elbows like a chicken. After a minute of this I laughed.

"Hey... that worked, I'm in a good mood now," I said, "Friday night, I'll pick you up at five-thirty, then we'll get the girls." As Tom walked away I could have sworn I heard him mutter a word that sounded a lot like 'Jeeze'.

Friday came and we picked Christy up at Mickey's Pizza. She led the way to Linder's house, often pointing out our turnoff well after we passed it. Like true gentlemen we waited in the car while Christy disappeared into a typical suburban house. She came out with Linder.

I can't describe what happened next, but it seemed akin to having the Big Bang Theory turn into a real life phenomenon right there inside my head. Basically my universe exploded, imploded, expanded and then burst apart, all in a single second. To say that the girl accompanying Christy out of that house was pretty would be like saying that Marilyn Monroe was kind of cute. Linder was a drop dead, gorgeous doll, like how they meant it in 1930's gangster movies. It wasn't that she was just hot. It wasn't that she was just beautiful. It wasn't anything less than love at first sight. I honestly fell in love with Linder the first time I saw her. Then my stomach dropped to the floor, as I realized the situation I was in.

To lay it out plain, here's how I saw it. Super shallow but handsome Tommy was to go out with Linder, the new love of my life, while I accompanied Christy-the-spaced-out-wide-eyed-nympho, on a romantic date. No wonder, I thought, Tommy was willing to do anything to go out that night. I decided that not only did I not like Tommy; I now decided that I hated him.

The date was much less than spectacular, probably because we let Christy plan it. All we did was drive to her brother and sister-in-law's house and watch them watch basketball. Linder spent a lot of the time in the kitchen. She had thought we were going to dinner, and was starving. I found her eating some stale two-week old pretzels.

"Christy's something else, huh," I said, super lame-o like.

"Yup," said Linder.

"You like Tommy?"

"He's okay," she said. We then drove to a park and drank a few beers, under a starry sky, on the picnic tables. The girls were freezing the whole time. And that was our date. It wasn't exactly a disaster but I couldn't think of a more inauspicious start to any relationship.

"Hey Ash," Tom said a few days later. "I forgot to get Linder's number, can you get it from Christy?"

"Do you like her?"

"She's hot." Tommy said. "I'm juggling two other girls right now but I think I can squeeze her in between dates with them." I decided right there that I would start to actively avoid Tom. But I did call Christy.

"Tommy forgot to get Linder's number," I said. "You have it?" She gave it to me.

I had begun having trouble sleeping at night and I even stopped eating. It took a while to place the problem, but I realized, one night at about three in the morning, that what was bothering me was that girl. I was starting to think about her all the time. When I showered, I wondered if she was showering too. When I had dinner, I wondered if she was having dinner too. When I drove to work, I wondered if she were out driving around also.

Finally, I was able to make peace with my obsessed brain by promising myself that if I ever got the chance again, I would make a run at Linder, and I would use every resource at my disposal. And now, in my hot, sweaty hand, I had her number. I knew it would never, ever, get to Tommy, but I didn't know my next step. Another bland date would be a disaster, I decided, but I didn't know what the girl liked to do. I did know, though, that I had one chance and probably ONLY one chance to try and get her attention. I just didn't know how.

Then Roger showed up at the counter of the pie place. Roger was a cool guy, was a bit older than me and had a really nice boat. He also had cool friends. He got a burger and we talked through the big order window.

"Brian and I are taking the boat out Saturday," he said. "We're bringing the girls, you interested?

"Yeah, sure." I said.

"You have to bring a date," said Roger. I thought of Christy and her crazy antics, like how her swimming suit always fell off, all accidentally like, at the beach, and then I thought of Linder. I told Roger I'd make a call and let him know before he finished his burger.

"Hello?" It was the voice of an older man, her father, I guessed. My stomach sank a little. I was sweating and my heart was pounding.

"Hi, is Linder there?" I asked. I literally held my breath. Roger was waiting and I was shaking.

"Linder who?" said the man with the gravel-y voice. I was later to find out that Linder's father was one of those jokester types that gave everybody a hard time.

"Linder Jamne," I said. I wondered if Christy had given me the wrong number.

"Oh, that Linder," he said. "I'll see if she still lives here or not." A long moment passed. My stomach was still churning.

"Hello?" It was her—I could tell by her voice. I breathed a huge sigh of relief, somehow Linder's voice always calmed me.

"Hi Linder, it's Ash."

"Hi." I took a huge breath and jumped into the icy water.

"A couple of friends of mine are going water-skiing Saturday," I began, all run-on sentence like, "and they're all bringing dates. I was wondering if you'd come with me." My heart stopped. Time stopped. The phone shook in my hand.

"What about Christy?" Linder asked. To this day I still can't explain why I said what I said next except that God wants me to know, every once in a while, what a huge fucking tool I am.

"Well, if you say no, I'll guess I'll invite her." There it was, the stupidest remark ever said in the entire history of the universe. There was a pause. Of course there's a pause, you freaking idiot, I thought. WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY?

"Okay," she said. "What time?"

"Can you hold-on one second?" Flushed with a million emotions, I ran to the counter where Roger sat. "What time would we pick my date up?"

"About six-thirty," Roger said, "we have to get there early to launch the boat." I ran back to the phone, where, to my horror, stood someone close to the dangling receiver. I scooted around them and picked up the phone.

"Six thirty." I said.

"I'll be ready."

"Thanks, I'll see you then," I said.

I spent the rest of that night in seventh heaven. I had done it—I had an opportunity, not with just anyone—but with a person I felt a bottomless yearning for. I would wear my best clothes, be on my best behavior and brush up on my funniest stories. I would be ready. And, I would have help. After the phone call I sat next to Roger and had a talk with him. Ignoring the glares from the manager, who really frowned on us cooks being out on the floor, I spoke to my friend.

"I'm crazy about her," I said. "I mean really crazy, like not eating or sleeping, crazy. I need to impress her. I need her to have a fantastic time." Roger put his hand on my shoulder.

"I'll let Brian and the girls know," he said. I always liked Roger; he was a person who would be there for you for the best of times and also for the worst of times. "Saturday, you're going to be the coolest guy we know."

I spent all Friday night getting ready. I washed, waxed and vacuumed the Mustang. I got a big basket of picnic supplies and filled a bag with towels and beachy stuff.

The plan was for Roger to drop by my house at six in the morning, and then he and Brian and the girls would follow me to Linder's house. Then, with them in Roger's Boat-towing Bronco and me in my Mustang, we would all drive to the lake together.

Everything went according to plan until I came to a light before a large boulevard. I couldn't remember if I had, that one time on the double-date, made a left or a right on that light. I did an eeny-meeny-miny-moe, and turned left. It was the right choice and with one more turn we pulled up to Linder's house. The front door was open so I knocked on the screen door.

There she was. She came bouncing out of the house with a beach-bag in hand. We jumped into the Ford, and with Roger close behind, we sped off toward a man-made body of water called Lake Paris. It would be about an hour drive.

I was so nervous I never stopped talking. I told her every story I could remember, and to my unending relief, she laughed at all of them. Then, during a stretch of dead air that I was trying tirelessly to avoid, she turned to me.

"So you and Christy..."

"We're done." I said. We made eye contact. "I'll never see Christy again."

"And that Bryce guy..."

"I'm done with him too," I said. "First, he's gone, and for a long time. But frankly, it was getting too weird anyway. I think he was just too big of a player. I started thinking people were following me home. I started getting really paranoid. And my so-called friends only wanted to use me to get to him. He's gone, period. All that's left is his dog. I love Mono, and always will, and I hope to God I'll always have him, but Bryce's out of my life for good."

"And you're going to college," she said. I started to feel like I was on a job interview, but since it was a job I really, really wanted, I didn't mind a bit.

"I've got one year left," I said. "I already got an A.A. at the community college and later this year I will graduate with a B.A. degree in Communications, from the university."

After paying at a small kiosk, we turned into a big parking lot. Roger and Brian began the process of launching the boat and I parked. And that's when I did it. I pulled her close and gave her the biggest kiss I could, right on the mouth. She kissed me right back. That second I became the single-most happiest guy in all the word.

The rest of the afternoon was like a dream. Roger's girl backed out at the last second, so it was Roger, Brian, Brittany, Brian's girl, and Linder and I. We water-skied. We had a picnic on the beach. We laughed and joked all day. Roger even dropped, just Linder and me, off on a secluded beach, where we necked for an hour. Eventually, sunburned, full of cold chicken and potato salad and plastered with sand, we called it a day. Linder had a shift at the department store where she worked, from five to nine that night. After one last kiss I walked her to her door.

"I don't want this day to end," I said. "Can I pick you up at work?" I had learned that she was saving for a car and that her parents usually drove her and picked her up for work.

"Okay," she said, "but if you are late or a no-show and I have to stand out there in the dark, you'll never pick me up again." This girl, I mused, had boundaries.

I raced home, took a shower, jumped into fresh clothes and then waited in the parking lot for two hours. I was damn-well making sure that this was not going to be the last time I ever picked her up. She came out of the doors and I swung the Mustang to the store front and jammed on the brakes. Holding her door, she jumped in and we were off.

"Hungry?" I asked, "I think I owe you a dinner that's a little better than a few stale pretzels." So we had two dates in one day. I made a promise to myself to go slow; the last thing I wanted was for this girl to feel rushed into anything. Besides, with Linder, just kissing was wonderful enough. We had the best food imaginable at the pie place, with Anthony dropping plate after plate of goodies by our table. We had steak, shish kabobs, shrimp and clam strips. Every now and then one of my friends would join us. After the pie place we went for a long walk around Linder's neighborhood. We talked long into the night. When I finally said goodnight, we kissed and kissed and kissed. I left walking on air, and drove home singing.

The next morning the phone rang. My mom yelled through the house that it was for me.

"Hello?"

"WE NEED TO TALK." Christy's usually light, bubbly voice now came across the line as cold and edgy.

"Yes," I said, "we do."

"COME OVER, NOW."

"No. I've got school work to finish and a class this afternoon. Meet me at Mickey's after, at 2-pm," I said.

To tell the truth, I wasn't sure what we needed to say, but we had been using each other for our own selfish needs for so long that it seemed like we needed some kind of talk, besides just saying 'it's over, bye'. All I really knew was that we were finally done, and that just by her voice alone, Christy seemed to know that too. I was kind of shocked, though, about how fast word of Linder and I traveled. But, I thought, the sooner we did this the better.

I finished the paper and went to class. The professor let us out early, so I had time before our 2-pm meeting. I decided to drop by Bobby's trailer with a six pack, just to settle my nerves.

After a quick knock I opened the trailer door. There, without a stitch of clothing on, in all her full-frontal glory, stood Christy. Bobby sat on the bed, wearing only his boxers.

"I love Linder," I blurted out. "So we won't be seeing each other any more." I was surprised, relieved and all but blissfully happy with the way things were turning out. Christy just put her hands on her hips and glared at me. That that girl could stand there, completely naked, without batting an eye, was nothing short of amazing. "So you two have a good time." I added.

This is the time that I usually say, 'and that was that' but it wasn't. Over the next few weeks Christy bedded every one of my close friends, while throwing in an acquaintance and a cousin or two, just for good measure. Hell, that girl would have tried to have sex with my sister if she thought she could have pulled it off. It was some kind of revenge thing, I guess.

As a side note, Bobby later told me that 'we didn't do anything' because 'I won't have sex with anyone I don't love'. In The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger's classic tome, character Holden Caulfield had a term for someone that tried to sell such a load of goods to a friend. I believe it was 'PHONY'.

After a few more dates with Linder I decided I wanted something special. I racked my brain and finally came up with a plan. Like the first two times Linder and I met (the double-date, the lake) I wanted a do-over, where a second chance might exchange a bad experience for a good one. In other words I arranged to rent Becky's parent's cabin in Lake Arrowhead, scene of the famous Six-Apple-Pies is All-We-Have-to-Eat, debacle. I needed a mountain do-over.

I wanted it to be just Linder and me, but I wanted some fun insurance, so I included Snowball and Monopoly-the-Anti-trust. Mono, being the great judge of character that he was, loved Linder within minutes of meeting her (at first he just stared at her, but then Linder and I hugged and kissed and laughed and Mono came right over, wagging his tail). It would be the four of us and tons of food. I brought chicken, watermelon, corn-on-the-cob and yes, a pie, but it was Linder's favorite and one I was not yet sick of, rhubarb.

My problem was Mono's aversion to car travel and the two-hour drive up the mountain. So, I did what I always did when faced with a dicey situation, I brought it to Sergeant Dad.

"You know that new girl I'm seeing?" I asked.

"She's a doll—you finally found someone decent," said dad. "Now don't screw it up like you do everything else."

"I wanted to take her to the mountains with Snowy and Mono," I began, "but Mono hates car travel. Any ideas?"

"Doggie KO pills."

"KO pills?"

"Yeah, I got a buddy who's a vet; he could get them for us." My dad always had a buddy somewhere that could solve any problem anywhere.

Here was the plan: we'd feed Mono-the-Wonderdog the KO pills before we left. He would conk out, and, together with Snowy we would load them into the back seat of the Mustang, atop a thick layer of blankets. Before the knock-out pills wore off we would all be safely secluded away in our romantic mountain hideaway and Mono wouldn't know what happened to him. We would do the reverse going home. My dad procured the pills and we had the proper dosage, based on Mono's weight, laid out.

First, we couldn't get Mono to eat a pill. He, like usual, sniffed every bite, and peered with a jaundiced eye at the parts of hot dog with the pill in it. Then, we hit on a solution. For every one piece of hot dog Mono got, Snowball would get four. This made Mono antsy, and he began to grab his pieces a little faster. Finally, we had a pill in him. Then we watched. And watched. And watched. Mono sat staring back at us, like we were total idiots. He didn't seem the faintest bit fatigued. So after a bit of time we decided to just leave, while hoping that the pills would kick in on the way.

We loaded Snowy and Mono into the back seat and onto the blankets. The moment the car started to move Mono was up in the front seat and on Linder's lap. In a panic he rushed there. Linder didn't seem to mind the sixty-pound dog, but his slobber seemed to put her off a bit. Soon we had a blanket under Anti-trust's drooling chin and all was well. The two hours passed slowly with Mono watching and worrying about every turn in the road. He was wide awake the entire ride up the mountain.

After what seemed like an antsy eternity, we pulled onto the cabin's dirt parking pad and shut the car off. We opened the door and Mono leaped out. He took two steps. Not five seconds had passed before, with an audible THUMP, Mono was on his side, completely passed out. The pills, I saw, had kicked in. He was out for the next two hours.

We had a wonderful time. Mono and Snowy loved the mountains. They ran and chased squirrels. They jumped on each other and on us. They went on a hike with Linder and I.

We managed to pick a perfect weekend to go, because late Saturday afternoon it began to snow. Mono ran around eating the flakes while Snowy barked at them. We had a fire and a picnic around the fireplace. Snowy, Mono and Linder looked as if they were having an eating contest, and, while I wasn't to sure who won, all our food was heartily consumed.

Later on Sunday afternoon we packed up the car and loaded Snowy into the back seat. Mono, however, was a different story. He would not get into the car. Of course my first impulse was to chase the lightening-fast mutt around the cabin. After much hi-jinks and hilarity, I switched to a new tactic. I tried food. Same result—all I had for my labor was a half dozen hot dog pieces in and around the Mustang, and a lot of giggles from Linder. In desperation I started the car and began to drive down the dirt lane before the cabin. Linder opened the door and Mono, after about a quarter mile, finally jumped in. He settled, panting and drooling, once again on the blanket on Linder's lap. Two hours and a gallon of spittle later, we were home. The doggie KO pills went straight into the trash.

Another time we went up to the cabin with Becky, her boyfriend, and her parents. It turns out that Becky's parents were as kooky as she was.

The four of us, myself, Linder, Becky and Jack were up early one morning, getting ready for a hike. Becky's dad came down from an upstairs cabin bedroom.

"Man, those electric blankets stink," he said. "I kept turning my control down and down and down, and all night long I nearly roasted to death." He got a cup of coffee, grabbed his paper, and retired to the outside porch, presumably to un-roast himself. Becky's mom came down five minutes later.

"Jeeze," she said, "did I freeze last night. The more I turned up the heat on that damn blanket, the more I froze." She also retired to the porch, presumably to unfreeze.

The four of us stood there and howled with laughter. We then entered into a debate on what to do that evening—some argued about mentioning the switched controls, some argued against any mention of it (the non-mentioning it side won, but that became a mute point when her parents figured it out on their own).

The next morning Becky and her beau had left early for a bike ride. Becky's parents came down just after Linder and I. Neither Linder nor I drink much coffee, so Becky's parents had the following exchange.

"Make some coffee," Becky's mom said (she said it all irritable like, like there should have been some nice hot coffee already ready). Becky's dad, rubbing his eyes, walked to a kitchen counter. There in front of him lay a coffee maker, sans the pot.

"Where's the pot?" Becky's dad asked.

"Right there in the sink," Becky's mom said.

"It's not in the sink," says Becky's dad.

"Then check the cabinet," says Becky's mom. Becky's Dad checks three different cabinets. Finally he puts a pot in the coffee maker. It doesn't fit.

"That's the wrong one, that's the old pot. Get the one with the black handle," Becky's mom says. Becky's dad finds another pot. It fits.

"Where are the filters?" Becky's dad asks.

"In the cabinet," says Becky's mom.

"There's none in here..."

"Not that one, the one to your left." Becky's mom's voice begins to rise slightly.

"Nothing here either..."

"YOUR OTHER LEFT," Becky's mom all but shouts. Finally Becky's dad finds a filter. He methodically installs it into the coffee maker.

"Where's the coffee..."

"OH, SIT DOWN YOU IDIOT!" Shouts Becky's mom. Becky's dad sits down and begins to enjoy his paper, while Becky's mom makes the coffee.

"Economy's going to hell," says Becky's dad after a long moment.

"Oh shut up," says Becky's mom.

I decided I would take some time off and treat myself to a desert camping trip. Belle in Joshua Tree is a first-come, first-served non-reserveable campground in a very beautiful part of the park. It has eighteen sites at about 3,800 feet elevation. It has no water and only pit toilets. But the sites are great because a lot of them are surrounded by huge red-orange boulders and teaming rock formations. It's a great place to go rock climbing and the whole area is dotted with Joshua Trees and amazing desert vistas. The only downside of this campground is that it always fills up on the weekends and holidays. However, since I had a few extra days off, I could arrive on a weekday, when the park would be all but empty.

I filled the Mustang up with gas. I threw in a tent and sleeping bags. I tossed in a gazebo-like thing called an Easy-up, or something like that, so that we would have a little shade. I had a lantern and two camp chairs. I stacked firewood in the car's trunk. I threw in a duffle bag with a change of clothes and then grabbed a big blue GOTT cooler. The following list is exactly what I decided to place in the cooler.

1) One medium-sized bag of ice

2) Twelve bottles of beer

3) One ham and cheese sandwich

4) One medium-sized apple

5) One big bag of potato chips

That was it. You can probably see now where I messed up, but at the time I thought I was all set. My plan was to arrive Thursday afternoon, set up camp, spend the night, and then drive back to Orange County and pick up Linder. We would restock the cooler (with tons of goodies, Linder loves to snack on snacks) and then go back out to Joshua Tree, where my tent would be saving our site for the sure-to-be-busy, Memorial Day weekend.

I drove out on a sunny Spring morning late in May. I took Highway 10 to Highway 62, and entered from the North, or the Utah Trail, entrance. I paid the fee and drove along the winding road that led to Belle. The thing I noticed most was that even at eleven in the morning, it was already getting hot.

I was right about Belle, the campground was all but empty. Belle is shaped like a lasso, with a single-lane road that ends in a loop. I picked a site at the end of the loop because it was the most private one available. I set up the tent and the Easy-up thing, and set our wood by the fire-grate and placed the camp chairs under the faux-gazebo. I set the cooler next to one of the chairs. And that was where I stayed, the entire afternoon. I sat in the camp chair, under the shade of the Easy-up, with the cooler within hands reach, and drank super cold beer.

As the afternoon wore on it became more and more hot. As it became more and more hot, the cold beer began to taste more and more delicious. I didn't move from my shady spot—it was just too hot under that desert sun. So I sat and drank and drank and sat. I seemed to be sweating out as much fluid as I was taking in, because I rarely had to visit the smelly pit toilet, that was about thirty yards away. I was snacking on my potato chips but I was not eating anything else. The beer I brought was an import in green bottles. It had a slightly skunky taste. It was getting more and more hot as the afternoon wore on. I figured it was about one-hundred degrees by about three p.m. By four p.m. I had eight empty beers and four full ones. At five p.m. I had ten empty beers and two icy cold full ones.

I soon found I could barely move. My body began to feel like it was made of lead. At six o'clock the sun was still up and the beers were all gone. I couldn't move. I tried to get up. I made it a few inches out of the chair and then flopped back into it. Then, I turned my head to watch the ground rush up and smack the side of my face, hard. I, while glued to the camp chair, had fallen over, and there I stayed, in the chair, on my side, with the cooler at my feet, and a bag of chips spilled out before me. As the sun set my own numb brain also bid the conscious world adieu.

A large Chevy Suburban truck rolled by on the gravel road by my site. I sat up and looked at my watch. It was nine p.m. It was dark, with a sliver of a moon and bright stars above me. I had yellow monzogranite sand-gravel encrusted onto the entire left side of my face. Little creatures were scurrying about, removing the potato chip pieces. They looked like kangaroo rats. I had that nasty ringing, woozy hung-over feeling that always came with too much beer. I was also very, very thirsty. I checked the cooler. Inside were twelve empty bottles of beer, one apple, and one ham sandwich. I had forgotten to bring water. I was in a desert campground, that had no water (unlike Cottonwood which had spigots around the sites, Belle was completely dry) and I was thirsty.

I stacked the bottles into a kitchen trash-bag and put the apple and sandwich on the second camp chair. Then I looked in the cooler. It turned out that I did have water after all. I just had to be willing to drink the melted ice that lay two inches at the bottom of the cooler. I wondered how clean the blue plastic tub had been when I took it out of the garage, but quickly decided that thirst trumped hygienic liquids. I drank the water straight from the cooler, because I hadn't brought any cups. I drank every drop of that melted ice, ate my sandwich, and went to bed.

In the end Linder and I had a great alcohol-free weekend and she was impressed by our terrific spot, and by Joshua Tree in general. What those people in the Suburban (and any other car that drove by) thought, I'm afraid to guess. I'm just lucky no Park Ranger happened by.

My dates with Linder didn't always go so well. December had rolled around during the time that I was still working at the café. As a treat to the employees, the company threw a Christmas party in a convention room in a swank hotel. It wasn't just a dinner; it was a dinner and a 'Mystery Crime Night' or something like that. The idea was that a theater-like company would put on a crime play, while the guests ate their food. They would lay out a lot of clues, run through the dining area shooting fake guns and then lights would go out and someone would be found dead with pretend blood all over them.

Then the Mystery Crew would pass out sheets that the guests would fill out, hoping to decipher the clues and solve the crime to win prizes. Everything was actually pretty awful, including the over-acting, lame clues and even lamer prizes. I filled out my sheet anyway, using my best guess on who and how the crime was committed (I was way off because I was barely paying attention to anything except for Linder). Linder, after signing her name to the top of the sheet, stared at it for a minute, and then tossed it aside. She had no interest in solving the crime nor did she seem to want a coffee-maker, a toaster or a fondue set as a prize. Here comes Big Misstep Number One: I grab Linder's blank sheet with her name on the top. I fill it out, with something that read like what follows.

"The Big Fat Man with the black falcon statue found out that Martha, the wife of the café's owner, gave him a healthy dose of the clap, or V.D. if you would. Then the girl with the huge fake boobs ran through the room, I know, because I watched every bounce and jiggle, and after a moment in the closet with the Big Fat Man, now also needed a shot of Penicillin. The girl with the huge fake boobs was cured by a nearby doctor, but because of an innocent tryst with a drunken sailor a minute later was re-infected. The effeminate guy in the fedora stayed clean the whole time, but died of boredom because his, and his cohorts acting was so damn awful. The big boob girl was again cured by the same doctor, but then the Big Fat Man turned off the lights and she was found to be re-infected again, but this time it was Chlamydia, made with real clams in this hotel's spectacularly terrible kitchen. Then someone poured ketchup on the poor dead bastard, because if that's real blood then I'm Abraham Lincoln's one-legged stepsister. The End."

I kind of thought I was being funny. But my plan wasn't really that well thought out. I figured we would read our own papers to the dinner crowd and that only Linder would see my joke one and that she would laugh. Big Misstep Number Two was when, during a moment when I was distracted, someone grabbed all the papers. The Crime Dinner Host, as I'll call him, had all the papers collected. Then the crime dinner theatre team went through all the papers. Remember, my paper with Linder's name on it directly referred to the CAFÉ OWNER'S wife as having and infecting others with V.D.

Well, they read the winning papers out loud. Three utter morons collected their coffee maker, their toaster and their fondue set. Then came the fun part.

"We would now like one Linder Jamne to please come to the head of the room," the fat emcee Crime Dinner Host guy said. And yes, then he read every word of my statement out loud, to the stunned crowd. Nobody thought it was very funny. He placed a dunce cap on Linder, who, to her credit, just laughed. Here comes Big Misstep Number Three: I sit there, mute, the whole time. It would have been great if I had jumped up and shouted, "That's MY paper!" And then transferred the dunce cap from Linder's head to mine. But instead I sat there like stone. Not very much happened after that dinner—even Linder took it in stride—but there it is, not every date turned out to be a romantic encounter between Sleeping Beauty and her not-so-handsome Prince.

Linder and I got along famously, even though we came from very different backgrounds. She was a very happy child while growing up; I was always moody and grumpy. She was a treasure, I was an Army Brat. We have a picture of her in her Communion dress—she looks like a cat that had just swallowed a canary. She is always happy if not sometimes a little mischievous. She had pets—turtles and rabbits and guinea pigs filled the Jamne house.

I have a picture of myself as a kid, wearing my Christmas Play outfit. I wore a floppy hat, with a big blue pom-pom on it and a red-striped vest. I have a big smile, but it soon turned into a frown. In the play I was to carry a banner out before the audience and then announce 'Christmas is coming'. During the play, I walked out, froze, forgot my line, tripped and ripped my red leotard, and wound up crawling on hands and knees off the stage. Someone else said "Christmas is coming' because it was a queue for others to start their scenes.

But together, we made a happy couple. Linder got me to see the bright side of everything and I amused her with my stories and misguided adventures. Everyday we grew closer.

We did everything together. We planned for the future and discussed traveling the world. We went out every single night. At first we both sort of joined my group of friends. That's how we wound up at a party thrown by Roger, that turned out to be rather onerous, and which started a trend where we began to shun other people, their parties and special events.

It was a housewarming party for a home Roger bought in Brea, and our attendance was expected. He and his girlfriend had taken out a mortgage, and with some extra money they saved, repainted, added new carpet and filled their new dream house with nice furniture.

We arrived around 7-pm and the party was starting slowly. We talked a bit with Roger and his girl, complemented them on their house, and then Linder and I relaxed in the back yard on lawn furniture, under a colorful umbrella. A few other people we didn't know milled around. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw her. She came over.

"Hi Ash." Mara said.

"Hi." I said. I said it fast, curtly like, and looked away. It was actually a painful experience, but I did it anyway and would do it again. Mara let out a small laugh and walked away.

"That was kind of rude, Ash," Linder said. "Why didn't you want to talk to her?"

"That was Mara."

"The girl with the 'WANTIT' plates, that you said looked like 'Want tit'?

"Yeah," I said, "I've mentioned her in my stories, but what I didn't say was that I used to have a huge crush on her."

"That's no reason to be rude." I began to get nervous, was this to be our first fight? I tried to speak in regular tones and with as much civility as possible.

"The only reason she came over was because I'm sitting with a gorgeous girl. She's into stirring things up. She wears low-cut tops just for that reason." I began. "Do you really want to sit and chat with a girl that only wants to make trouble, and that who, after she gets what she wants just laughs and walks away?"

"It was still rude."

"The end result was the same, though." I said. "She laughed and walked away. It's interesting that she still accomplished what she wanted, us feeling uncomfortable." Linder sat for a while and then spoke.

"Thanks for the gorgeous girl compliment," she said. I was grateful for that comment, but Linder continued. "That girl is across the yard, glaring at us, by the way.

"I'm not going to look over."

"Give me a huge kiss, then." I did. I never saw Mara again, either at the party, the pie place or anywhere else. It was still a sucky experience, though.

Then next thing to happen at that party involved Becky. She showed up late and proceeded to try and 'catch-up' by downing drink after drink, which she said was her own invention, grape juice and vodka. Linder was off talking to a group of girls and I was sitting on the couch, next to Roger's new glass coffee table. Under the table lay a carpet. It was not just any carpet; it was wall-to-wall egg-shell white double-shag carpet. In other words Roger's new carpet was long and fluffy and white, pretty much just like the fur on Snowball. Becky came over and stood about three feet from where I sat. I watched her wobble a bit and then I watched her as she set her grape-juice-vodka highball on the glass table, but she only got the glass part-way on the table and when she let it go it tumbled right onto Roger's new carpet. Now here's where I make my fatal mistake. I SHOULD have eased myself out of my seat and headed immediately in the opposite direction. But that's not what I did.

"OH SHIT," Becky says, "holy shit!" She screams. I sprang into action. I rushed to the kitchen and grabbed a roll of paper towels. I jumped on the foot-long dark purple spot staining the lush white shag carpet. I proceed to make the deep purple foot-long spot into a light purple, three-foot stain. Becky, of course, disappeared. Word spreads of the mess I MADE spilling my purple drink. We're asked to leave and I never see Roger again. On top of that Linder has to drive me home because I'm loaded. Plus the party was a huge bore. I decided I'm sick of parties, sick of weird friends and just generally sick because I drank too much.

The next day Linder and I have a talk. It isn't exactly a fight, but she seemed to see boundaries that I didn't.

"Do you think you drink a lot?" Linder asks. More about that later.

My pie place career came to an abrupt end and that also had to do with Becky. As you might imagine, I was none too happy about her disappearing act at the party. I didn't mention anything, but I did withdraw from her and people in general. I was no longer funny-story-guy; instead, I became kind of quiet.

"Where's the whipped cream?" Becky asked, one afternoon at the pie place.

"In the walk-in." I said. Walk-in referred to our large walk-in refrigerator with its big stainless steel door. Becky had a cone-shaped bag that had a steel tip on it. It was made to ring pies with cream and hers was empty. The star shape at the end of the steel tip made the whipped cream come out, well, kind of star shaped. After a few minutes Becky came out of the refrigerator.

"It's cooold in there," she said, "and there's no whipped cream." I went into the fridge and saw just that—that we were out of whipped cream. Feeling kind of ornery, I grabbed a tub. It was the exact same kind of tub the whipped cream came in but what was inside was a little more yellow-ish and much more oily than cream. Inside the tub was mayonnaise.

"Here," I said, and I set the container on the counter. I, not wanting to stir up a new batch of cream, made myself scarce by taking a break outside by the large greasy, green trash bin. Someone else could help that dipshit, I thought, once she discovered she had a tub of mayo and not a tub of cream. I came back from my break and thought it a little odd that no one was making cream and that Becky was back out on the floor. I shrugged it off and took care of a few orders—a hamburger here, a tuna melt there, and an order of fried chicken for someone that wanted to die of a heart attack. Then I heard the announcement.

"Manager to the register, please." Yup, you guessed it; Becky had filled her bag with mayo. She then topped a pie with the yellowish, greasy, really hard to mistake for whipped cream gooey stuff. The customer left. The customer then returned with the pie, sans one slice. The customer was, to say the least, pissed. The manager, a large woman named Bertha, who was not of the easy-going Jesus-loving ilk, in turn got really pissed. Becky, not two second's into the mayo-cream investigation that followed, pointed at me.

"He gave it to me and said it was whipped cream." The manager read me the riot act and assigned me two hours of extra cleaning duties. I did them, but I did them pissed.

"All done," I said to the large night manager.

"You can knock off the shenanigans, okay?" she asked.

"You can shove this job up your ass, okay?" I replied. And that was that.

I was to receive my diploma in 1984, but before I could, I needed to have my graduation papers filled out, signed by the department head, and filed with the school's administration. The problem was that Professor Shaw, the head of Cal State Fullerton's Communication Department, pretty much loathed me. I had taken a senior-level class from him and he wasn't impressed by my commitment, or lack there of, to my Major. By the end of my college career I had lost interest in school in general, but I was too close to graduating to quit. Professor Shaw spoke with an accent and he also mixed up his clichés.

"Student who subscribe to Advertising Age is Crop-of-Cream student." He would say, and he would say that pretty often. I don't think I made a very good impression on the department head. While most students dressed for success, in preppie fashion, I lived in jeans with the knees torn out. I wore flip-flops, which, if we went to the beach over the weekend, I would sometimes forget to throw back into the Mustang. In that case, I would run to class barefoot. I would also fall asleep in class, especially if I was hung-over, which was pretty much most of the time. One day I was all but nodding off in the back of the classroom, dreaming of unicorns and acorns and unclad ingénues.

"Blah, blah, blah... Mr. Ash W. Patrick." I snapped awake upon hearing my name. Bewildered and mystified, I sat mute and hoped Professor Shaw would move on to another victim. "What do you say is the answer, Mr. Patrick?" Three seats in front of me, a girl turned, with her hand over her mouth.

"Seven," she stage-whispered.

"Seven," I said.

"Very good," Professor Shaw said. "Tell me how you arrived at this answer." The answer girl, at that point, seemed to have retired, or else she found something very interesting about the blackboard at the head of the class, because she didn't turn around again. I was sitting there, all alone, with all eyes on me, my wild hair and my ripped-out jeans.

"Add... subtract," and when the professor just kept staring at me, I added, "and multiply." Since the answer was a number, I felt it was a sure bet that one of those could have been the answer.

"Correct!" Shaw said. He then moved, like I had hoped, onto another student.

With the deadline for grad apps quickly approaching, I made an appointment with the professor.

"I see you want your graduation papers signed," he said.

"Yup, they're all filled out, I have a "C" average and all the required course work," I said.

"Tell me Ash, what do you want to do with your diploma?" Shaw asked. "What kind of job?"

"I don't know, maybe something in art or writing. Maybe a layout artist."

"You don't need a CSUF diploma for that, you can just take the job on merit."

"Yeah, but I still want to graduate." I said. "There's where you sign, right there." I pointed to the unsigned spot that said department head.

"You see Ash," began the professor, "if a student from this university graduates and then goes on to do great things, everybody's happy, you see?"

"Yup," I said. "Just sign right here."

"But..." continued the professor, "If a, let's say, a student that wants only to drink beer and eat pizza, you know, a student that is maybe, only watching T.V. all the time, and he graduates, then it is bad for all of us, you see?"

"Yeah, that would be crumby," I said, "here, I have a pen."

"You come back and see me soon," he said. He pushed my unsigned papers back to me and folded his hands.

"When?"

"Soon." I left his office with what felt like a rock in the pit of my stomach. I had met all the requirements, I had put in six years of work (yes, it took me six years, three at the community college and three at the university, to get a four year degree) and I was all but out of time, money and patience. Were I to have to go through one or two more semesters, I knew I would just drop out. In other words, it was now or never, and I had less than a week to have my papers approved by a department head that thought I was a beer swilling, pizza eating T.V. watcher, which I was, but no one ever told me that a person like that didn't deserve a diploma if they did the work and got the grades. I began stalking the guy, but he could go places I couldn't. I spent countless hours outside his office waiting by a closed door. He just never showed.

When I had only one afternoon left to turn in my papers, I sat by his door and when I realized that I would never graduate, I all but wept. With less than an hour left to turn in my papers to the Admin Staffers, I began to feel utter despair. I hung my head and pulled my knees up to my chest. I just sat in front of his door and watched the minutes tick off. I would not graduate In the spring and that meant that I would probably not graduate ever. My parents, in frustration with my prolonged scholastic career, had stopped financially assisting me. I had quit my job, and I was sick of school. So that would be that, I would have wasted all the last years and all of that money for nothing. Ten minutes left.

"Ash," she said, "is that you?" Professor Caroll was the head of Cal State Fullerton's Journalism Department. I had taken a PR class from her and we really hit it off. One assignment was to quickly write a press release and then take that work home and edit it. I took the work home, smoked a joint, and then saw every flaw in the work as if it were underlined in red. I corrected the paper and rewrote it. I got an "A". I remember Professor Caroll telling me, after class, that 'whoever corrected that paper of yours really knew what they were doing'. I remember replying 'It was just me and Mr. Big Fat Doobie'. She laughed out loud. She really did. Man, I loved that class and that professor.

"Hi Professor Caroll."

"Well, what's the matter Ash," she asked, "your dog die?"

"No." I told her the whole story—about how my department head thought I was a poor representative of the university and was avoiding me and that I really could not afford to go to school much longer.

"You got all your classes in and at least a "C" average?" she asked while looking over my papers.

"Yup, I even had Admin double-check."

"Okie doke." she said. She pulled out a pen. "Here you go. You are as good any one of these knuckleheads around here, Ash, so don't let anyone convince you otherwise." She signed the papers and handed them back to me. "Looks like you have about four minutes to get these to Admin, and those flip-flops you're wearing don't look very fast." I hugged her and kissed her cheek.

"I think I love you," I said, almost though tears." Professor Caroll was wrong about my flip-flops. I was across campus and at the Admin counter in less than two minutes. Between gasps of breaths, I handed over papers.

"That was fast," said the lady, who I decided was my newest best friend. "Janice said you were on your way." Janice was Professor Caroll's first name. She had even called the secretaries at the desk and asked them to keep the doors open for a few more minutes. My papers were stamped, filed and I was told to finish up the year and then, if my current grades were sufficient, I would get a graduation invitation in the mail.

P.S. later I learned that Professor Shaw had read Professor Caroll the riot act for signing my papers. But I do believe God, (who I don't really believe in, or maybe I do) watches over fools and idiots in flip-flops and torn jeans. In the spring of 1984 I graduated and received my diploma. Thank you, Professor Carroll, from the bottom of my heart, thank you.

It was a warm Spring day, and my father was relaxing with a beer and watching baseball. I took a deep breath, realized that I was going to ask him to give up his leisurely Sunday afternoon, and interrupted his game.

"Dad, The Stang is broke."

"Broke how?"

"It starts fine, but the moment you push on the gas, it dies."

"Strange," he said, "Let's have a look."

"Sorry about your game." I said.

"It's only the Mets," dad said, "and they're getting their asses handed to them on a platter... as usual."

My dad started the Mustang and, just like me, saw the car stall when given any gas at all. After tinkering under the hood with no effect, we headed off to the store. The great thing about my 1966 Mustang was that under the hood sat a very straight-forward V8, with lots of room to replace things like alternators and belts and water-pumps. My dad filled a cart at the auto parts store with everything from spark plugs, spark plug wires, a distributor cap, a carburetor cleaning and rebuild kit, and more.

"You're going to pay me back for all this stuff," dad said. "Right?"

"Yup." We spent the best part of that Sunday taking things apart, putting them back together again and replacing everything under the hood that could be replaced without too much trouble. We replaced the fuel and air filters. We climbed all over that car and tested every part with all these gizmos my dad had in the garage. We checked the electrical and fuel systems. Still, we got the same result.

"Air in, fuel in, sparks, combustion," my dad muttered to himself. "Simple enough, why then..." Then he paused. "Air in, exhaust out," He said. "Start up the car." I started it. My dad walked to the back of the coup. He knelt down and placed his hand by the muffler. "Hit the gas." I did and the car stalled. "We've been focusing on the wrong end of this son-of-a-bitch." He said, laughing. He got his tools, climbed under the back of the car and started clinking away. Finally, he crawled out. "Help me pull." We tugged and tugged at the muffler; it broke free and slammed to the ground with a terrific thud. I tried to move it. It weighed, I kid you not, at least forty pounds. It should have weighed about seven. My dad grabbed my keys and started the car. It roared to life. I mean it ROARED to life. My dad hit the gas and that car roared like a space rocket. Varoom, VAROOM, VAROOMMMM. I put my hands over my ears. The neighbors started coming out of their houses.

"Okay, I think we got it, dad." I shouted. He turned off the engine. He tossed me the keys.

"Have one of your idiot buddies drive you to a junk yard," he said. He kind of kicked at the stone-dead and just as heavy muffler. "They should have plenty of these there. Find one that you can lift easy with one hand. That thing has almost twenty years and thirty pounds carbon in it."

I called Bobby up and he agreed to drive me to the yard. We found a 1966 Mustang. We removed the muffler and paid ten bucks for it. When we got home we found it was slightly different than the Mustang's original muffler, but using some extra clamps and baling wire we had the thing attached and pulled tight up into the rear of the car. Then we started it up. The new muffler was louder than the old, and gave the car a deep throaty sound. The extra parts and new filters and spark plug wires also made the car seem to run better. The combination filled Bobby and I with awe. The Stang was back, better than ever before.

It took six months, because it took a while to get another job, but I paid my dad back every cent.

My friend Todd got me my next job. Brea Disposal was a private trash company with a Charter for that city. The company was rather small; they had about eight trucks and operated only in the city of Brea. Each route consisted of about 500 houses. We would dump 250 houses, make a run to the dump, and then do the other 250 houses. After another dump pass we would be done for the day (except for Wednesdays, when we had to wash our truck).

The work was pretty grueling, smelly and kind of foul, but the money was phenomenal. After only two months I paid off every debt I had and even saved some money. After a few months as a swamper (the guy that rides on the front bucket) I learned to drive the big fifteen-ton truck. The great thing about the job was that when we were done with our route, we got to go home.

The city had a rule that the trucks, because they are so noisy, couldn't start their routes until 6-am. So we made sure that we were at our first stop at 5:59. At six it became a race. Dump the first half of the route, run to the dump while eating our lunch in the truck, and do it again for the second half of the route. Most times we got back to the yard at 1:30-p.m.

Other times, like if it was raining or around Christmas, our routes took longer. But in Southern California, generally you have low trash amounts and great weather. Another exception to this was high summer when we would have extra cans full of just lawn and yard clippings (this was before recycling was made mandatory).

One of our pet peeves was when a home owner would forget it was trash day. We'd see them dragging their cans out in their pajamas and bathrobes. But sometimes we were fast enough to get off the street before they could get their trash out. Then they kept their trash another week. There were good people that gave us tips. There were nasty people that held their noses as we roared by. And then there was 'THE KID'.

At first we thought he was cute. If I had to guess, he was about five or six, or right about in there. It was summer. He had a little bicycle. His street was on a hill, and it was about two blocks long, when, at the end, it made a left turn and leveled out. THE KID, as we called him, was always waiting for us at the top of the street, on his bike. We would pull up to the stop, and begin dumping the cans. Right as we were dumping the last can, he would race off, to the next house. We would pull up just seconds after him, and then the fun really began.

The big houses had an average of four to six cans at each stop. As we dumped the next stop, THE KID, who had raced there while we were still dumping the last house, would do his celebratory dance. It was something any end-zone-celebrator could truly admire. He jumped up and down with his arms stretched to the sky. He would yell.

"I WON! I WON! I WON, losers, losers, losers." He screamed. While he pronounced us losers he would pantomime blasting us with invisible six-shooters. Then it was back on his bike and another race, down the hill, to the next stop. He always left before we were done with the stop and he was always waiting for us at the next, ready with his great little dance and blast move. He did this for every stop on the street, about nine or so houses. Like I said, at first it was cute. I mean it was cute the first week in June. It was kind of cute the second week in June. It was a little less cute the third week in June. By the middle of July we began dreading that street; but every time we turned the corner, there he was.

To tell the truth, the kid in us (it was me and a swamper named Israel) were kind of bothered that he cheated by always leaving before we were in our vehicle, the truck. The moment we grabbed the last can he was off, and that insured his automatic win. We tried to ignore him. We hoped school would start soon. We told him we didn't want to race him, but nothing worked—in the summer of 1984, a kid in Brea lived for his victories and his dance. So every week, at all nine stops, we got the whole treatment. One day, late in August, the day we did this kid's route, I began to form a plan.

"Israel, I would like to win, just once." I said. Israel looked intrigued. "Just one time."

"How?" Israel asked. "He cheats. Most of the time he's at the next spot before we're even back in the truck."

"Yeah, but did you notice," I began, "that at the bigger stops he dances a little longer?"

"Yup, I've seen him have to scramble back on his bike in a panic, when we're fast on those." Israel said.

"That's right." I said. "So here's my plan..."

The third house on the street had ivy and large trees, and thus more trash. They usually had six or seven cans, and, crucial to my plan, they were the big steel kind, not the light plastic ones. Here was my scheme: we would roll up to the first stop and dump the cans very slowly. We would completely ignore THE KID, which usually made him kind of irritated, which in turn made his dance longer and louder. Israel and I would be talking the whole time, to make it seem like THE KID was even more invisible then ever. We would repeat the same act at stop number two, ignoring, talking, dumping slowly, we would even take a 'stretching break' to make it seem like we had all the time in the world. Then, came stop number three with its six, big metal cans. These we would dump as fast as we could, hoping to catch THE KID off guard. We figured at the slow pace we had set he would dance extra long (and loud). Then came the thing upon which the entire success of the plan hinged. I would have three big metal cans, and Israel would have three. These we would set three across and two deep in a wall in front of THE KID. In other words we would make a Great-Wall-of-Thrash-Cans between THE KID and the next stop, all while he was still scrambling for his bike. If all went well we would arrive at house four with a sweet, sweet victory in hand.

My heart rose when I saw, down the street, house number three did indeed have six big metal cans out. We followed the plan to the letter. We talked, stretched, and dumped the first two houses slowly. At the third house we sprang into action, dumping all six cans with lightening speed. As we had predicted, THE KID was slow to his bike. By the time he was ready to ride, he found himself imprisoned by a wall of steel.

The plan worked. We got to the next stop. WE WENT APE-SHIT NUTS, dancing and shouting 'WE WON!' over and over again. And yes, just when everything seemed to being going so right, everything went so wrong. First, THE KID pulled up, eyes wide and mouth agape. Then he began to cry. Wail, actually. Then Israel nods to me to look over my shoulder. Well, it turned out that house number four was THE KID's house. And now, coming out of house number four, in a bathrobe and in curlers, was THE KID's big, fat mom.

"What is the matter with you nitwits?" she screamed. THE KID began to sob even louder. The mom pulled THE KID to her bosom and hugged him as he cried and cried. "HE LIVES FOR THIS STUFF! All he talks about all week is his race day and his unbroken string of victories!" Our apologies were drowned out by sobs and more 'what the heck is the matter with you idiots' rants and ravings. "You should know better—you're adults! You should act like ones, instead of terrorizing a sweet little boy. Come on Johnny, I'll get you a snack and we can forget about these awful creeps."

We had two more blocks before our 10:30-a.m. dump run. Israel and I did those houses in silence, while even avoiding looking at each other. Then, half way to the dump I found I couldn't resist the urge to giggle. What was a small giggle turned into a full-fledged hysterical laugh. After a moment Israel began to laugh also, as loud, if not louder, than I.

As a footnote, things did change. The next week we turned the corner, and, for the first time in a dozen or so weeks, there was no THE KID there. We dumped house number one, two and three. At number four Israel motioned with his head. I looked over. Deep in the garage of house number four two eyes glared at us. THE KID sat on his bike, in the garage and gave us a mad-dog stink-eye look the whole time. He did not move, he just watched. Apparently, his racing career had ended, but the grudge he had against us, had not. This repeated for another week and then THE KID disappeared, probably to cause distress and disfavor at some helpless, hapless, school somewhere.

Chapter 6

The garbage man job had its ups and downs, which included treasure hunting (what some people throw away) good pay, plenty of exercise and being able to work outdoors, which was a plus, at least on good weather days. I have more stories, like when we found a box of risque pictures, from a house where a hot chick, that resembled the picts, lived. Or when we opened a trash can to find a pissed off possum in it, or when we launched a large rotten tomato into the windshield of one of our own company's trucks, which had our buddies in it. But I only worked there for a year, so I'll move on.

My next job was as a layout artist for a printing company. It was a job I enjoyed but it didn't pay much. They also could work you pretty hard, with long hours. It was at this time that I had my own apartment. So, I had a job I liked, savings from the trash job, my own place and a girl I truly loved.

For the most part, Linder and I were happy, except for the elephant in the room. A trend started in college and that grew in the macho world of the trash business that continued unabated into my life as a living-on-my-own, layout artist. I had long ago quit smoking pot; it was just too hard to get quality stuff at a good price, and I really didn't like dealing with, well, dealers. That buzz vacuum, though, was heartily replaced. It was replaced by something cheap and easy to obtain (I had turned twenty-one months earlier). It was booze.

I'm not going to go into the down-and-dirty of my drinking days, it's enough to say that at first I used alcohol recreationally, then socially, and then I developed a full fledged addiction. I began to obsess about the next time I could get loaded on beer, which then led to beer and whiskey, and then to mostly whiskey.

Addiction is a strange thing. It can strike anyone from any walk of life. It can come on suddenly or it can take a while to mature. You can have it and think that you don't. Some call it a disease, others a moral or will-power problem. It can be hard to tell if a person is suffering from addiction; mostly, the person him or herself is the only one that can know for sure, but there are plenty of signs. One thing to look out for is if it's in the family—like if a grandfather or uncle or relative has it. Another is a personality change, the 'Ed's different when he drinks' syndrome.

Lack of control is a sure sign, social drinkers usually don't get falling down drunk and curse-out their entire family. Another is dependence, not being able to get through a day without the addictive substance. Another is frequently using large amounts. Another is denial, 'all I'm doing is having a good time' they say, after they consume an entire bottle and pass out. Another is using in the face of adversity; social drinkers don't usually lose their jobs because of drinking, and then keep on drinking and drinking the same amounts or more, anyway. Those are all pretty good definitions of addiction, and at one time or the other I had seen most of those in my life. But the great obsession of any addicted person is to conquer the problem.

They try and try to use the substance, in my case alcohol, responsibly. There may be short periods where the addict can maintain a good front, but sooner or later the person falls back into irresponsible, destructive, abusive behavior. Some say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, while expecting different results. In other words it is insane to expect that, after drinking an entire bottle of whiskey, everything will turn out just fine and that everybody will love you. It never turns out that way, but an addict keeps hoping that it will, that he or she can use and still be healthy and happy. But it just does not work that way.

One of the biggest problems with addiction is that self treatment seldom, if ever, works. Mostly one has to get a professional involved, or at least something between the addict and the substance, where the addict can develop the tools to fight the continual, unending desire for the substance. Alcohol Anonymous works for some, rehab for others, a doctor's visit can help too. But usually it's a combination of these things that can help an addict keep away from his or her true love, that high. A good formula is this: find a good rehab, where you are forced to stay away from the substance and forced to be with honest people already fighting and winning against addiction. That separation is usually needed to fight denial, where your own brain tells you that drinking a bottle of whiskey a night is good for you. Then jump into A.A. with reckless abandon, and follow all their advice like it is a religion. For A.A. to be successful, one must get a sponsor, someone that has had long term sobriety, and follow the A.A. plan, which usually means regular meetings where you 'share', constantly reading the Big Book, and working, diligently, the Twelve Steps. But at the time when I was working as a layout artist, I was doing none of that stuff, instead I was trying to hide my problem while trying to maintain a relatively normal life. That was the Elephant in the room.

Linder and I saw each other frequently, and she stayed over at the apartment on weekends. I tried my best to behave, and did, for the most part. I would party the hardest when she left, or when I was alone. If I wasn't going to be driving, and I was in my apartment, I usually hit the bottle pretty hard.

One day I came home from a long day at work. I stuck my keys in the door, ran straight to the cabinet, poured myself a large tumbler of whiskey, gulped it down, and then walked to the door, pulled out my keys, closed the door and then sat on my couch, with another full glass in my hand, and, hanging my head in my hands, I then proceeded to try and figure out where my life had gone so wrong. I was absolutely, positively miserable, and I thought I didn't know why.

The next day I awoke with my head ringing and my mouth dry. I drank some water, showered, and dressed. I had not pulled out my pull-out bed. I had slept on the couch, and my back was screaming. Otherwise everything looked as it should, with one exception—on the coffee table, next to the couch—was a large phonebook.

"Ash," she said. "it's for you." I was at work. I picked up the phone.

"Hello?"

"We've checked your insurance, and you are covered," the voice said. "We have a space for you—when would you like your recovery to start?" I was stunned. Then I thought of the phone book; I must have called someone while drunk. Then I remembered, I had found a treatment center in the book that was near my apartment, and had explained my problem to a nice lady on the phone. I looked at the press-board at the shop, we were overwhelmed by jobs and very understaffed. I was sick of being overworked. I must admit, part of my recovery had, at first, begun by not wanting to go through another 'hell week' at the printing company.

"How about first thing tomorrow morning?" I said.

"We'll be waiting."

I had Linder call my work, explaining my absence, and I also had the treatment center send them a letter, so that I would be granted a medical leave. I was there for a few weeks days. Linder visited me every day, she was so grateful, to the point of being overjoyed, for me taking the initiative to start work on my problem. Now we were at least talking about that elephant in the room, and it was because of my own accord and not because someone had forced me to. That can make all the difference, sometimes.

Treatment consisted of inpatient, doctor supervised detox and then one-on-one and group counseling. We did role playing and problem solving exercises that focused on abstaining from alcohol in social situations. We went to a ton of A.A. meetings and were encouraged to start the steps. We kept a journal. After the four weeks we were required to go to daily A.A. meetings and to attend follow-up weekend workshops.

After rehab, I got a sponsor. It was as difficult to get a sponsor as it was to get Bryce, the drug dealer, to call me. But I approached both situations the same way; I badgered, bugged and pestered until the person I wanted saw I was serious and said yes. Glen, my sponsor, gave me clear instructions: start each day on your knees with prayer, read the Big Book, work on the steps, network with other alcoholics, stay away from situations where I used to drink, call him everyday to report my progress, and mostly, go to meetings and meetings and meetings. It was doing that that almost got me into another kind of trouble.

A hand touched my shoulder. I rose, hugged three people entering the club, and returned to my seat. I was known at the meeting, all because of a blown stop sign, a loathing for smoke and a simple memorizing technique—Powel sanded turnips in the wrong direction, Rita listed Amy's inventory while praying a message.

The A.A. meeting at Fullerton's 805 Club was always crowded. Old-timers, regulars, newbies, and court-cards filled the hall from corner to corner. The best seats, at least for me, were the ones next to the windows. I preferred the seats next to the windows because at that time smoking was allowed in the meetings and I hated leaving with a sore throat and stinking of cigarettes. At least a window let fresh air in once in a while.

The incident that made me known at the meeting started with me running late on a Friday. Anxious to get to a window seat, I sped through a stop sign before the house at 805 Hart Avenue. I had just pulled into a parking place across from the club when my vehicle filled with red and blue lights—I was being pulled over.

"License and registration, please." After handing my documents to the officer, I could only stare helplessly at the club, into which members were passing the threshold in regular intervals. "Where are we going in such a hurry that stop signs become invisible?" the cop asked. Before I could open my mouth, the officer continued. "This is a residential neighborhood."

"An A.A. meeting. The 805 Club right over there."

"They don't care if you come late," said the officer.

"The place fills up. There'll be no place to sit."

"You a regular there?"

"Yeah."

"I'll tell you what, let's go take a look at the full club where you're a regular," the officer said. I felt my stomach tighten while walking to the meeting with the officer. My gait felt awkward as I walked, my legs felt stiff and wooden. The blue uniform strolled beside me. As I neared the house my heart sank, no one loitered at the door, a sure sign that the club was crowded. To my relief, when the light of the club fell on me and my eyes adjusted, the smoky room was full. The relief ebbed somewhat when I saw every eye turn to me.

"Anybody here know this guy?" asked the cop.

"ASHHHH!" They shouted. It was deja vu all over again, only I was trying to recover from substances instead of indulging in them.

The crowd had shouted in unison, and I saw the officer do a double-take. To me it was a curious response, the shouting of my name. I had never done more than introduce myself to a handful of members, but I was aware that my ASH was stenciled on my printing uniform shirt. And, A.A. members take care of their own—especially in front of cops or courts—every member could identify with the trouble alcohol mixed with authority could bring.

"Your registration has expired and your brake lights didn't even flash at that sign, Ash," said the officer. The man had a sturdy face but nothing in it betrayed the reason for his interest in me or one blown stop sign. "But I'll tell you what, you tell me the seventh step and I'll pretend we never met." The tug on me was almost overwhelming as I fought the urge to swing ninety degrees to my left, where I knew a giant poster listed all twelve steps. As I drew a breath, I realized the room had become silent. I heard a cigarette lighter click open and click shut. Powel sanded turnips in the wrong direction, Rita listed Amy's inventory while praying a message.

Powel... "That we are Powerless, number one." Sanded. "That God could and would restore our Sanity, number two." Turnips. In the quiet, I heard a whisper. Right on, the voice said. The officer shushed the man. Turnips. "Were ready to Turn our will over, number three." I could see the officer glancing over my shoulder. In. "Did a moral and fearless Inventory, number four." Wrong. "When we were Wrong..." I stumbled. Eyes focused on me, and many people silently mouthed words. "Rather, admitted to God and to another human being the exact nature of our Wrongs, number five. Number six..." Direction. "Were ready to have Defects removed, number six."

There were claps, more encouragement and more shushing from the officer. I saw a lady with her hands out, she had both fingers crossed. One man was giving me two thumbs up. Then the room fell quiet again. I knew I wasn't getting the exact wording correct but I also knew I had the gist of each step right. Even at the edge of my goal, I had to resist turning and looking at the poster, though I hadn't needed to. I had memorized the steps; a new member named Amy had asked me which step was number nine (the Amends step), and I couldn't answer her.

"So are you a newcomer, too?" she asked.

"Not really," I said. "I've been coming for a while but I don't know the steps by heart. They're in the Big Book." I added rather lamely.

I remembered her as being very pretty. I memorized the steps that night using the first letter of a sentence technique. Powel sanded turnips in the wrong direction, Rita listed Amy's inventory while praying a message. Rita. Remove. "Number seven, humbly asked God to Remove our shortcomings." The officer handed me back my documents but his parting words, enjoy your meeting, were completely lost in the din of the roaring crowd. All stood and clapped. I slid into a newly placed chair in the corner, beside a window. A lady winked at me. A man slapped my shoulder. Others glanced at me and smiled.

"FINISH THEM." Many people called out, Finish them! The room quieted. The officer was gone, but I, apparently, was not done. Listed. "Eight. Made a list," I yelled. Claps and laughter. Some finished the sentence... of all that we have harmed and became willing to make Amends to them all... Amy. "Nine, made direct Amends."...except when to do so would injure them or others. Inventory. "Ten, continued to take personal inventory..."...and when we were wrong promptly admitted it... finished the crowd. Praying. "Eleven, sought through Prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, AND TWELVE, Having received a spiritual awakening carried this message to other alcoholics..." and to practice these principles in all our affairs, finished the crowd. I was known at the 805 Club ever since that day.

"My father always said to walk a mile in a man's shoes before judging him," shared the next person in the discussion. "That way when you do judge him, you are a mile away and you have his shoes." Everyone laughed. Laughter, no matter how corny, they'll tell you, is also part of recovery.

I was clean and sober for a year, when Linder and I decided to get married. Much to the chagrin of the guests, we had no booze at the reception. To be fair, we did have the reception in a large room at the bottom floor of a big hotel, where there was a huge bar just across the atrium. So anyone that wanted to could take a short walk and come back with a drink. To their credit, I did not see any guest do that.

As a wedding gift, my parents bought Linder and I a honeymoon cruise to the Caribbean. It was a wonderful gesture and a great gift. As it worked out, we needed to be on the plane that very evening (which worked out nice because the guests were able to leave the reception and go straight to a party hosted by my parents, at their house, and where everyone could party-hardy with all the free booze they could handle). We left the reception, drove home, grabbed our already packed bags and then jumped into a waiting cab that raced us directly to LAX. We flew to Miami and boarded the ship.

We had a blast for the first three days, and then came the evening of the third night. Linder was tired and called it an early evening, around 8-p.m. The trouble with a cruise is that most people party like crazy, day and night, on the boat. I started to get very antsy. Even though they have Friends of Bill W. get-togethers (that's code for an A.A. meeting, because Dr. Bob and Bill W. started A.A. in the thirties) the urge to 'have fun' like everybody else, and break my fresh, first year of sobriety began to mount in me. I have something like a committee in my head that is always there arguing for a drink.

"Just one," the committee said.

"No." I responded.

"It would be fun. Do it."

"No."

"Don't let anyone tell you what to do, just drink."

"No."

"Forget that 'Cult of Deprivation' called A.A. and just take a sip."

"No."

"F-everyone, you deserve to let loose."

"No."

"Hey, cool guys like Spencer Tracy and Errol Flynn loved booze, be like them."

"No."

It would go on and on, if I let it. A.A. teaches you that those thoughts are something they jokingly call Stink'n Think'n. The point is that you can't entertain that kind of talk in your head. When those thoughts hit you, A.A. members tell you, you need to call your sponsor or a trusted sober friend. They'll talk to you make you realize that those kind of statements are just sobriety sabotage. I brought my Big Book on the trip, and at that point I should have taken it out and read it. I should have found a way to call someone, even if it were a ship-to-shore emergency like thing. My sponsor had warned me, that being out of my sober, safe environment would be risky, but with one year under my belt we figured it was okay. I did neither of these things; instead I shut the committee in my head up by saying one little thing... Okay. I dressed in our dark stateroom while Linder slept. I squeezed out the door and into the brightly lit, long halls that those big ships have. I made my way up a series of stairwells and through a set of double doors that led me out into the crisp night air. The exposed deck was blustery and a little chilly. Overhead the stars were bright and clear in the sky. But I did not heed any of that; I was on a mission.

They would forgive me, I thought, I could restart my program once I got back home. Linder, I hoped, would also forgive me. Meanwhile I could party my ass of on this lovely, hopping, honeymoon cruise ship.

At the very top of the ship was a large Disco club. It was complete with the mirror ball and loud music. Even from outside I could feel the vibe from the place, it reverberated pure fun. In the blustery, chilly, slightly damp with sea sprayed air, I stood before the glass encased room and my mouth all but began to water. I could easily see inside the large windows. In there I saw attractive women. I saw groups of people around tables. I saw romantic couples. I saw people dancing. I saw young people, just like me, laughing and having terrific fun. But mostly I saw the twenty-foot long bar, which was dotted with every kind of drink. The place shined—neon lights shone bright between blasts from the mirror ball. I reached for the door. The handle was a long piece of round plexiglas supported on top and bottom by metal brackets. It felt cold and slightly slippery in my hand. I stood there, hand on the door handle, for what seemed like ten minutes. A couple exited the bar and I had to move quickly away. I retreated to a railing which had a coat of seawater on it. I leaned into the blustery wind and stared at the bright stars in the dark inky night. I peered down. The water was rushing below in great gales as the ship cleaved the sea, on its way to another island.

I returned to the door. I stuck my hand out and grabbed the round plexiglas-bar handle. I can still feel how that door handle felt, even now, years and years later. And there I stood, for another twenty minutes. A couple came up from behind me to enter the bar. I moved aside. The man slapped my shoulder and spoke to me as he passed.

"Come on in," he said, "let's have some fun."

"I'm right behind you," I said meekly. Come in and have some fun, he had said. I stood outside of the bar in the cold blustery night and pondered those words. That's what I wanted... fun. But while it might be nice clean fun for that couple, for me it was a lot more. For me it would mean re-entering the world of obsessively chasing my demons. For me it would be jumping into a world of excessive drinking. A world of drunken nights and hung-over mornings. A world of failed dreams and broken promises. A world of drinking away the horrors of drinking away the horrors. And, I'd be telling that committee in my head that no matter how many Big Book chapters I read, no matter how many rehabs I entered, no matter how many of the steps I finished and no matter how good my sponsor was, I would still be listening to their dictates. In a word, I was about to become, once again, a slave.

I leaned over the rail and watched the water rush by. I was cold. I hadn't brought a jacket. But still I stood.

"So? Lot's of people are slaves to one thing or another," the committee said. "At least now you'd be getting some fun out of it. And," the committee continued, "this time it will be different. You have a year of abstinence behind you. That shows you can handle it, so... GO HAVE SOME FUN!"

I again walked to the door. I again grabbed the handle. I again just stood there, frozen, outside of the bar. This repeated itself three or four more times. I would alternate between the rail by the wet deck, and the door. Rail, door, rail, door.

Then, standing there, outside the bar, in the freezing night, I watched as the lights in the Disco went out. I finally, for the first time that night, gave the door handle a hearty pull. It moved an eighth of an inch and then made a 'clunk' sound. It was locked. I had stood outside the bar, bouncing between the rail and the door, for over seven hours. The place finally closed. I looked at my watch, it was quarter past two. I look around. The whole ship had this 'gone to bed' feel. I took a deep breath and found myself flush with a huge sense of relief. With everything on the ship closed, I was guaranteed one more night of sobriety. I combed through the empty, dead ship until I found my room. Using my key, I entered it. The light was on. Linder had sat up all night. She had known about my struggle; she told me later that she had been worried all day, because I had an unfocused, distracted look about me the entire afternoon, where, on deck, they had had a pool party complete with free alcoholic beverages. Seeing her red eyes, I seized upon the opportunity. I staggered a bit and wobbled.

"I'm Sorrrry, Sweetheart," I said. I slurred heavily and wobbled some more. On our honeymoon, in our room, on the high seas, Linder began to weep. I was more grateful for that night's moments of indecision than I was about anything else in my entire life. I sat on the bed next to her. "Actually," I said. "I think I passed some kind of test." I spoke the words real clear like, and let my very non-boozy breath touch her face. "Sorry about the joke."

That girl hit me so hard, I could barely take it. Afterwards we hugged and laughed. We made love. We spent the rest of the cruise focused on each other, and nothing distracted us again, the entire cruise. Not once, during the rest of the cruise, did I ever really struggle hard against the urge to drink. The committee had been subdued, they even came off as embarrassed asses, with their week mumblings about 'having fun' when I was already having a freaking blast. And that was that.

It is now decades later. While nobody has a perfect program, I've made Linder very, very proud of me. Next month marks the twenty-seventh year together since that first date water-skiing on Lake Perris.

We've had a blast; we've traveled to exotic places like Peru, Brazil, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Belize, Honduras, Guatemala, Malaysia, Fiji, Europe, Canada, South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Tanzania and many more places that would make this sentence too long. Linder still wants to travel to China, or maybe India or Japan. Linder takes pictures and makes scrapbooks of our adventures.

She writes journals—we self-published her Brazil diary (called Linder in Brazil). We casually leave it behind at far away places that have book borrowing libraries.

She has photographed over 1000 birds, including: Red-legged Seriema, Toucan Barbet, Great Argus Pheasant, Resplendent Quetzal, Orange Dove, Toco Tucan, Hyacinth Macaw, Secretary Bird, Ground Hornbill, Jabiru, Wattled Crane, Grey-crowned Crane, African Fish Eagle, Bateleur, Elf Owl, and many more.

She had seen amazing creatures in the wild, like: Jaguar, Anaconda, Proboscis Monkey, Bat-eared Fox, Leopard, Wild Dog, Cheetah, Black Rhino, White Rhino, Western Tarsier, Reticulated Python, African Rock Python, Lion, Serval, Brazilian Tapir, Blue Whale, Killer Whale and Costal Brown Bear, to name a few.

The following are a few bits from Linder in Brazil. Skip to the last page if you have already read that book.

9-13-07 Thursday Jaguar Research Center.

TODAY WE SAW JAGUAR! TODAY WE SAW JAGUAR! The temperature last night dropped dramatically and I woke chilled to the bone. I went to the bathroom and grabbed an extra blanket. Ash was also awake and cold and said they had thick bedspreads so I grabbed one of those. It was warm and snuggly. Then I woke up again freezing only to see Ash had wound his big sloth-like body in the spread and I had none! I pulled over my fair share while he groaned.

At 5 a.m. we were awakened by the real strange sounds of Howler Monkeys that sounded like they were just outside our door. We sneaked out of our tent with flashlights and walked through the sleeping camp trying to find them. At the edge of the forest by the river we could see the beginning of a new day about to dawn as the horizon went from black to gray. We heard the Howlers again but they were farther away, having moved on. We went back to our tent called 'Lynx' and crawled back into our cozy bed. We got up at 6:15 and I washed my face in the washbasin (that had a moth floating in it) filled from an overhead water bucket. Man, this is camping!

I got dressed and went outside and there was Marcos at a table. He was taking seeds out of pods. He said his girlfriend made jewelry with them. I too got some of those seeds yesterday when we passed the plants and boy does that seem a world away now.

We had breakfast in a screened octagonal tent. We had real delicious papaya and watermelon and fresh hot scrambled eggs. Marcos asked what we preferred for breakfast and I said scrambled eggs so he had the staff whip them up. (Eggs are pretty innocuous and have more protein than oatmeal, which is what we usually have but not on vacation.)

I asked for hot water for tea and they had some on the table so I pumped out some and a bunch of ants came out so they brought me a new hot water jug. We also had fresh squeezed orange juice. What a great start for the day! I could hardly believe we had this whole camp to ourselves. It sure wouldn't be the same with other tourists milling around. I felt this was an opportunity of a lifetime and that we really lucked out. I'm told July and August are the busy times so we just missed the rush and that's why they were able to be so flexible with our changing plans. When we first got here it was so smoky and gray (there was a fire in Chapada) I thought 'what bad timing' but now I think we are sooo lucky.

After breakfast we get our travel gear (cameras, packs, water, hats, bandanas and sunscreen) and head off to the boat. We climb in and start our day's adventure!

It was a clear and beautiful morning but already warm. I could tell it was going to be a hot one so I immediately slather myself up with sunscreen. We cruise the river. Our boat guide knows many back tributaries, some that are so shallow that Ash has to climb to the very front of the boat to level the bottom and pull the motor out of the water a bit.

In the back streams we see tons of Caiman, many seven or eight feet in length. We got close to many even to one with its huge jaws open and you could look into its mouth and see that its throat was closed. We got too close to one and it was huge and it hissed at us and thrashed around. We saw a little guy that had caught a fish. We saw an Iguana on the shore along with many, many Capybara, some with Cattle Tyrants on their backs. It was all quintessential Pantanal.

We snuck up on several Southern Screamers that would fly off making quiet noisy honking sounds. In the distance we saw Howler Monkeys in the trees and Capybara in the tall reeds. The place was teaming with Caiman. There was less birding than Pixaim but a lot more possibilities of great findings.

We often paused with the motor off and stopped and watched all the life around us—boy, the world sure was our oyster! At one point Ash and I scamper to a bank to 'find a bush' as they would say. (All that morning O.J.) Boy I felt better afterwards. Since Ash had nothing to read last night but 'The Birds of Brazil' he kept asking for rare birds he read about like the Zig-zag Heron. Anytime we saw a Tiger Heron Ash would say 'there's another Zig-zag Heron'.

Then we hid the boat in the reeds and Marcos did a playback and some Black-capped Donacobius came to the reeds and put up some fuss and I got some good shots of them. We also saw another large Jabiru nest.

After a while Ash kept saying how we really need to see a Jaguar and how he sure does want to see a Jaguar. I think, 'oh boy will he be disappointed'. They tout Jaguar but you know how that kind of thing really is... all talk. They get you in and when you don't see anything they say 'well maybe next time'. All we hear is how OTHER people saw them. I have just watched Ash spend over an hour searching every blade of grass with his zoom lens and binoculars. His head is turning like a periscope and I think 'what the heck is he doing?' He won't talk or look away from the shore. He's holding his camera up to his eye but keeps also looking everywhere.

At 10:50 a.m. on Thursday, September 13, 2007, Ash yells real loud 'THERE THEY ARE!'

Ash screams 'There they are!' I think... 'what?' Marcos says to be quiet and then I see a shape of a cat on the shore under some trees and it's looking back at us. My heart starts beating real fast as I try to focus on the cat. We get closer and it stays put and I get lots of pictures of this beautiful Jaguar sitting and staring at us. There was another one, a male, that ran off when it heard us. The female stayed put and stared. She got up and I kept clicking away. She walked into the brush. You could just make out the male in the background.

We moved our boat to the shore across the river and got out and saw fresh tracks. They were on this beach we were now exploring and had just recently swam across to the other side.

Boy, was Ash excited about being Jaguar Spotter Extraordinaire! He said it was the best day of his life and I agree! It was the big payoff we had so dearly earned before and during this trip. I was stunned to actually see a Jaguar and then to see one clear enough to get its picture was fantastic! Looking at the tracks Geno and Marcos pointed out that one was clearly bigger than the other. A male and a female, we guessed. We got back into the boat and went back across the river to the willows and saw the male stroll through the brush with the female following. I got pictures of their beautiful coats through the brush. They are such elegant cats. Boy was this unbelievable, this is why we're here and it was Ash that spotted them!

We wouldn't even be here today if I hadn't asked to leave the Eco Lodge early, what bizarre luck! It seemed Ash had a calling and just knew when it was time to look for them, THANKS ASH!

Now we could enjoy the rest of our trip since we had witnessed the main event. Even my books say 'don't even THINK of seeing a Jaguar' well, they were wrong! We are at the ground floor of a new tourist venture and got a sneak peek private viewing. Now I could see why they could charge elite prices for a package like this.

We cruise down the river in the Jaguar afterglow. Ash is in heaven and so am I. The whole trip now makes sense and now we can enjoy it.

9-23-07 Sunday Chapada to Sao Paulo

TODAY I WAS (almost) ATTACKED BY KILLER BEES! I slept well last night; the bed was real cozy. I looked at my alarm and it said 6:30, time to get up. Boy, I sure miss those eight-hour nights of sleep. I got up and got dressed and went out to meet Benedito. He was talking to Richard, the owner of the Posada, and our driver. Richard asked how my night was and I told him I slept very well.

Now we are off to see the National Park in Chapada! We got in the car and on our way to a lookout point; it was a little hazy but you could see some tall red rock cliffs. We walk down a trail to get a better view. The area has interesting rock formations. We were high over a gorge and below green parrots flew by. It's hard to believe that yesterday I was hiking up a lookout in the Amazon and today I'm hiking in Chapada to a lookout. These are very different habitats. We walk back and it's good exercise. We drive back to our Posada in time for breakfast.

I go get Ash who went back to sleep after I left. We go out to the breakfast area and Richard announces that breakfast is ready. We go to a charming elegant little English dining room patio-like place that has tables for two. I pick one by the window. Richard asks if I want coffee or tea. I say tea and he shows me his selection and I pick out black currant. He asks if I want a big pot or little and I say little. He fills the pot with boiling water and puts my tea bag in it.

Our table has china and fine linen. I didn't want to use the lovely linen napkin with the embroidered flower on it; it was too nice to get dirty. The breakfast spread was unbelievable. They had a counter full of breakfast yummies. I had mango, pineapple, papaya and orange juice all of which was fresh and sweet. You could see the mango tree outside. They had egg quiche, cheese quiche, corn muffins, fresh berries, a variety of breads and a lovely cake with frosting. You didn't know what to try first. I sat and feasted and sipped my black currant and was all of a sudden in England and not Brazil. Outside they had a feeder and these cute Black-collared Finches were all over it so I snuck out and got a few pictures. I don't think I have ever had such a great breakfast. Ash went to talk to Richard and I got more fruit.

When I was finished I went over to where Ash and Richard were sitting on the veranda. Ash told me that Richard had hunted Jaguar in his hey-day. He told me Richard said you couldn't even sell the hides these days nor get anyone to tan them. They have a Jaguar head over the mantle of their fireplace. I'm sure glad times have changed and I bet the Jaguar is also glad. We talked about the different cat sizes and how the Pantanal cats are the largest. I get the impression that he is like Denys from Out of Africa. We got our bags together and said our goodbyes to Richard. He seemed genuinely pleased that we had a great time. Now we are back in the car for a trip to Stone City, a part of their National Park Chapada do Guimarães.

We drive on this long red-dirt road with areas where the car touches the road because of deep grooves or soft sand.

Wow! Will we make it in this car? We come across a Campo Flicker and another Burrowing Owl that sure looks strange with those weird eyebrows.

We get to the parking area of the Stone City and get out of the car. I have Benedito take our picture by the sign. We go a little ways on the trial. Ash is in front. Ash turns abruptly around and is clearly alarmed. Behind him I see a million bees coming our way. Benedito yells 'GET DOWN' and he lies flat on the dirt. Ash jumps at the command and tackles me to the ground to protect me against the bees by covering my body with his own. ASH MY HERO! The bees pass and it's safe to get up. I have a little scrape on my leg but other than that I'm a-okay. Benedito said that more people in Brazil are killed by killer bees than any other animal or insect. They are an aggressive hybrid of Africanized bees that were accidentally released in South America years and years ago.

Actually Brazil was fantastic. I remember so many good times: having a staring contest with a Jaguar, the expressions and reactions from people that hear you saw six (really five) of the big cats, having a tented camp in a remote area of the Pantanal to ourselves, the hummingbird house in Argentina and watching all those beautiful hummers all around, our room service feasts especially the chicken and rice soup in the Tropical Hotel in Iguazu, taking a dip in their pool, Ash showing me the sights as we dodge the crowds around the falls, Coatis that like beef sticks, puddles of butterflies, seeing that Manakin and Tanager, my morning walk by the falls where I had the place to myself, meeting Marcos and realizing we were about to embark on a rugged adventure in the Pantanal, the toothpick bridges of the Transpantaneira, seeing all the Jabirus in the shrinking ponds with the gluttonous Caiman, seeing Jabiru nests, my first Roseate Spoonbill, watching the Caiman cross the road, slowly, all the new birds in the Pantanal, all the water you could drink at Santa Teresa, seeing all those cute Capybara, the giant Caiman at Jaguar Research Center, our bird filled cruise on the Pixaim River, trying a Brazilian soda, listening to 'Wild Horses' on our night drive, all our adventures with Marcos and our great mealtime conversations, walking along the river at Santa Teresa and seeing Capybara and Caiman, fresh pineapple, watermelon and papaya every day, the fresh squeezed orange juice at Santa Teresa and watching the Troupial bird at the orange rind pile, our little frog in the bathroom of Santa Teresa, seeing the Hyacinth Macaws at the palm grove, finding their long beautiful blue feathers, the close parrots around the Jaguar Eco Lodge and being able to leave a day early, seeing Crab-eating Foxes on the night drive, every moment at the JRC, staying in a tent in the jungle and being awakened by Howler Monkeys and Southern Screamers, our wonderful meals Maria made on the houseboat, taking a shower on the boat and again outside in the jungle camp, having the entire camp and crew to ourselves. Whew, boy, did I have a great time.

Dealer's Dog.

I self-published a six-hundred page novel, that nobody could read, called Khing and the Magic of Black and White. It is about a homeless alcoholic that thinks a wizard has stolen his soul. It was something I always wanted to do, write an epic novel. That nobody liked it seemed beside the point.

We live in an apartment and drive crappy cars, but it's experience that we lust after. In short, we follow our dreams, and, just like that first date, we go out to have fun, and we do that every single day (except for when we're sick or have a rash or something, then we're miserable).

I have only one thing I would change. I wish I had never taken that first joint or drank that first beer.

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THE END

Thank you for reading my book. If you enjoyed it, won't you please take a moment to leave me a review at your favorite retailer?

Thanks!

William Patrick

khingemail@yahoo.com

