Jerk-Moves

I was listening to our local morning radio show 93X on the way to work the other morning, and they were having a ‘Jerk-Off’ contest for tickets to some concert.  They were having people call in on the air live and tell their story of a time where they pulled a jerk-move or did something that made them come off as a complete jerk.  I tried to call in and tell them a story of my own, but I could not get through as I just kept getting a busy signal.  I have been on the air before with those guys (see my 9/7/12 blog entry ‘STD’) and I thought they would enjoy the following ‘jerk’ story.

It was February of 2007.  My then girlfriend at the time Nadia and I had driven from Minneapolis down to New Orleans for a wedding of the daughter of a friend of mine.  Nadia and I were in the French Quarter at a gift shop and I noticed in the postcard section a huge ‘Mammy’ postcard with the typical heavy-set black cartoon woman on the cover.  My friend Penny McCartney is not a racist or anything, but I knew she was into the history and collected that stuff.  So I bought the card and a stamp so I could mail it to her right away and have it postmarked from New Orleans.  I wrote something short and quick like:  “Hi Penny, I know you like this Mammy stuff so I thought of you when I saw this.”  I dropped it into the nearest mailbox and that was that.  Cool, right?

No.  Not only is Penny not a racist, she is a lawyer managing the State of Colorado’s Civil Rights Division.  As the state counterpart to the federal civil rights law she is responsible for enforcing Colorado’s Anti-Discrimination Act.  And without thinking about what I was doing, I mailed the postcard to her work!  It was the only address I had, and I had been mailing her cd’s and other correspondence to that address for years.  So like always I just used the one address I had for Penny and off went the mammy postcard to the office of the State of Colorado’s Civil Rights Division.

A couple weeks later I got an email from Penny.  “Do you have any idea what you have done to me?!”  Uh oh.  My mind raced.  What??  What did I do?!  “The postcard!” she screamed online.  She then proceeded to tell me how the large black female receptionist in her office had eventually, wordlessly handed over the mammy postcard to her with an evil glare.  But only after she had passed it around to all of the other people in the clerical department for a few days before finally giving it up to Penny.  The entire angered department then proceeded to f*ck her life up for years afterwards with delayed deliveries, dropped phone calls and lost mailings.  It was so bad that a couple of years later this large black female receptionist was the catalyst for a phone call that Penny received from a psych ward.  The receptionist had been admitted as an inpatient to the facility and they were obligated to call Penny and warn her that the woman had made direct threats to her therapist that she wanted to “kick Penny’s ass”.  Wow.  My simple two-minute goodwill gesture of sending a postcard to a friend totally screwed her over at work for years.

That particular jerk-move was not on purpose and I felt really bad, but a couple others were definitely on purpose and I enjoyed them immensely.  In the fall of 1985 my best friend from high school Mark Smith moved into my dorm room with me at the University of Minnesota.  We had a suite, each with our own bedrooms and a living room in between.  He fancied himself a clever jokester, so one night I thought I would show him a neat trick by waiting till he went to bed in his room and then I rigged up the ol’ water-bucket-on-the-door trick.  It worked to perfection the next morning at about 5am when the dog we were keeping in our room started whining to go out and pee.  Mark opened his door and “Blammo!”, the large bucket of water perched atop his door and attached by an elaborate system of strings and a pulley completely soaked him from head to foot.  So awesome.

Another time in the early 1990’s I was at a house-party with a bunch of people from my first wife Lona’s work.  I did not really know any of them and I was bored and not enjoying myself much.  At one point I got up to use the bathroom.  I was pointed down a hallway but was not sure which door was for the bathroom.  The first door I tried turned out to be a bedroom.  I started to back out and close the door but then I noticed a camera sitting on the dresser.  Nobody was looking so I went in, turned on the lights, closed the door and I took a picture of my naked butt.  I had gotten the idea from a new show that was sweeping the nation, 'The Simpsons'.  I put the camera back and went to find the bathroom.  I forgot all about it until a couple of months later when Lona asked me if I had taken a picture of my ass with the owner of the house’s camera.  This was back when there was not digital cameras…we all used actual 35mm film.  The couple had brought the film in to be developed and were quite dismayed when they got their photos back from the Fotomat and one of them was a picture of a butt.  The pictures were date-stamped so they figured out that it happened at their party, and by process of elimination eventually figured out it was me.  Good clean fun.

Probably the worst jerk-move I ever pulled though was on Memorial Day weekend in 1991.  I was living at Lona’s parent’s house in Waukesha, WI.  Like any good blue-collared Wisconsin folks they liked to drink a lot and threw a lot of parties.  I loved living there.  Her parents Kenny and Nancy treated me like one of their own, and Kenny was basically my best friend.  So that Memorial Day her parents threw a big bbq party complete with a keg, tons of food, and dozens of family and friends.  I had a beer bong with me from my college days and eventually brought that out.  We were out in the back yard and I was showing people how to down a beer in seconds with the apparatus.  Pretty soon everybody was trying it and loving it.  Kenny tried it…Nancy tried it…even Grandma tried it.  It was a huge hit.

We were all having a great time and then suddenly Lona’s little brother Corey showed up with all of his big-shot high school football buddies.  They strolled in wearing their letter jackets, noticed the beer bong on the table near the keg and scoffed.  The guys bragged that nobody could down a beer as fast as them and Corey claimed that he was the fastest.  I peered at him and formulated a quick plan.  Earlier that day when Kenny and I were at the liquor store buying the keg I noticed a 6-pack of ‘Pepper Beer’ on the shelf.  It was from Mexico and each bottle had a jalapeno pepper floating in it.  I liked hot spicy stuff so I thought I would give it a try and bought a 6-pack.  It was god-awful hot and not very enjoyable.  With each flaming-hot sip your body would crave cool liquid relief, so you would instinctively take another sip and just compound your misery.  It was a novelty item at best and nothing I would ever buy again.

So after listening to Corey brag about how fast he could down a beer-bong, I challenged him to a dual.  We would take turns, somebody would time us, and we would just see who was really the fastest.  He nodded, smiled and all his football buddies clapped him on the back and assured him that he would kick my ass.  So Kenny got out a stop-watch and I grabbed the beer-bong and went in to the kitchen to fill it up with beer.  But instead of filling it with Miller High Life from the keg, I of course popped open a pepper beer and filled it with that.  I brought the apparatus outside and while everyone at the party was gathered around us in a circle to watch, I tipped my head back and put the tube to my lips.

At the last second though I lowered it back down and said:  “You think you’re the big-shot, you go first.  Show me how it’s done.”  So I handed it over to Corey.  He smiled confidently, tipped his head back and downed the entire pepper beer in about 2 seconds.  Damn, he was fast.  He looked up and started to smile but his look of triumph instantly turned to pain and fear.  He dropped to his knees and liquids started pouring out of mouth, nose, eyes and pores.  He was puking up beer and snot was hanging out of his nose while tears and sweat were running down his face.  He had no idea what had happened to him and he was freaking out as his body was desperately trying to rid itself of the offending liquid intruder.

Everyone’s laughter quickly turned to concern and I felt terrible.  I grabbed some paper towels and tried to help clean him off after he stopped hacking and drowning in his own puke and snot.  Corey was a great guy and I felt bad about reducing him to a puddle.  It was the ultimate jerk-move and one that I always felt bad about.  I am sure everyone has pulled few jerk-moves out there…it happens…just be careful.

Homeless

I have a real problem with people being homeless.  As I posted in my 8/27/12 blog entry ‘Down By The River’, back in college in the mid-80’s my friends and I spent a lot of time exploring the banks of the Mississippi River and climbing on the various bridges over the river in Minneapolis.  In our many explorations we came upon a lot of homeless people living on the riverbank and under the bridges.  Sometimes they would have a dirty old mattress to sleep on, or just some blankets or towels…but no home.  I had never seen that before and it blew my mind that people had to live like that.  They never bothered us and we did not bother them, but their condition always bothered me.  I was sleeping in a nice warm bed in my expensive dorm room at my fancy college, and they had literally nothing.

Well I decided I could change that in the only way I knew how at the time:  beer and cigarettes.  So every once in awhile me and a friend or two would grab a case of beer, a few packs of smokes and head down to the river.  We would find some friendly homeless people and invite them to join us for the afternoon.  We would smoke cigs, drink beer and listen to their stories.  Everyone has a story.  Some funny, some meaningless, but mostly sad.  I am not sure it helped, but I think just having someone to talk to that did not look down on them was good for them.  Hopefully it made them feel like it was not always them against the world…that some people out there cared a little bit.

As I posted in my 8/16/13 blog entry ‘Austria’, Lona and I spent a sunny afternoon in Vienna in the summer of 1990 hanging out with three homeless people drinking beer and smoking cigarettes.  We had a lot of fun, but I had a real hard time dealing with the concept that some people have to sleep in parks while some people sleep in mansions.  The people we met that day all used to have homes, but fell on hard times and ended up living on the streets.  Could it happen to anyone?

I have more or less always had a home.  Even when I was backpacking in Europe with Lona that summer in 1990 we knew that when we got back to the States we would probably stay at her parent’s house in Waukesha, WI until we got on our feet again and found a place to live.  We eventually did just exactly that, but when we first got back in September I got in a huge fight with Lona.  I was so incredibly hurt, bewildered and angry that I grabbed my bank-book, some clothes, all my cassettes, and drove my ’74 Dodge Charger from Waukesha up to Minneapolis, MN and couch-hopped at various friends houses for a few months.  I did not have a ‘home’, but I always had a place to stay thanks to the kindness of my friends.

It was a crazy few months in which I ended up dropping almost $4,000, mostly in bars buying rounds for my friends, drowning my sorrows and burning through a lot of my savings.  I was not eating much that fall as my mind was not at all on food.  I would occasionally eat a turkey-bagel sandwich, but mostly I was just full of self-pity and bent on having what I thought was a great time at all costs.  One day when I was at my friend Gary Paulson’s house I looked in the mirror and I realized that I was pretty skinny.  I hopped on his scale and was dismayed to see that it read 147 lbs.  I had been around 170 lbs a year ago in college and that was about the right weight for my 5’10” frame.  Ah well, I didn’t care.  Back to the bar, and at the end of the night on to whatever couch was available.

There were various accidents during those drunken months.  One night at a party a bottle of beer slipped out of my hand into the sink.  I tried to grab it and save it, but my hand arrived at the bottle just as it was shattering in the bottom of the sink.  The broken top of the bottle sunk into my right middle-finger and sliced it deep, flapping it right down to the bone.  Another night I was at my friend Randi’s house fixing her an authentic Greek meal like the hundreds of ones I had recently enjoyed in Greece.  I was cutting up a cucumber for a Greek salad when I cut off the tip of my left index finger.  Just a small chunk of flesh and fingernail, but it came clean off and bled for 3 days.

So I was technically ‘homeless’ for a few months, but I always had a roof over my head and friends around.  I eventually patched things up with Lona and went back to her parent’s house and lived there for a year before the two of us moved on to Madison, WI.  We continued to follow the Grateful Dead around the country, but always had a home to go back to.  Unlike some of the Deadheads we encountered on our travels that basically lived wherever the Grateful Dead were.  ‘Home’ was their VW bus and they would travel around selling their wares in the parking lots of wherever the Dead were playing that night.  It was a gypsy type of life and had its romantic charm, but I was always glad to be back home after seeing a run of Dead shows.

One night after the first of two Grateful Dead shows at Madison Square Garden in New York City, on 9/17/93 to be exact, we decided to walk back to our hotel which was just a block off Times Square.  It was me, Lona, our friend Travelin’ Dave that I had met in the dorms in Minneapolis, and his friend Attic from Milwaukee.  We were all high on acid as well as the good feelings that we had from the wonderful show that night.  On the walk back we marveled at the late-night hustle and bustle and lights of mid-town Manhattan.  When we got to the corner of where our hotel was a scraggly guy asked if I had any spare change.  I was all happy and feeling groovy, but did not feel like pulling my wallet out so I offered him a few cigarettes instead.  We got to talking and he was a really nice guy.

He walked with us and when we got to the entrance of our hotel I told him to wait there while I ran up to the room and grabbed a bunch of beers.  I came back down and we had a party right there on the stoop.  A couple more homeless guys came over and we smoked and drank and talked.  They were really nice and very thankful and polite.  One guy was so thankful though that he offered to give me a blowjob.  Yikes.  I thought it was a nice gesture, but I politely declined.  I suppose it was all he had to offer, but I quickly decided that there are some things that are not better than nothing.

About 10 years ago I spent a summer volunteering at a homeless shelter one night a week, cooking and handing out food at the shelter.  The people that came in were almost always genuinely thankful and appreciative, but they all had an aura about them.  An extremely noticeable aura of sadness and pain.  When you look past the dirty hair and shabby clothes you see a real person though.  A real person who is sad, scared, mentally and maybe physically in pain, and completely desperate and hopeless.  It makes you want to take them home, let them take a shower, wash their clothes, give them as much food as they can eat, and send them off with a bunch of money.  It would be so cool to be rich and be able to do that.

The homeless do not want to be in the situation that they are in.  Nobody would want that.  People often see a beggar on the corner and say:  “Get a job!”, but it’s not that simple.  Someone who has been wearing the same clothes for months and has no identification is not just going to be able to walk into McDonald’s and get a job.  A homeless man with mental problems or drug/alcohol addictions is not going to get that door-greeter job at Wal-Mart.  When I see the guy at the intersection holding up a ‘homeless’ sign, if I have my lunch on me I will hand him that, but if not I occasionally will hand him or her a $5 or $10.  I know they may just head to the nearest liquor store and get a bottle of booze, but so what?  Can you blame them?  Hopefully they will buy some food, but I am not going to be the one to begrudge them a buzz.

Statistics vary widely because there is no way to accurately count the homeless, but it just blows my mind that there are as many as 3.5 million people in the United States that experience homelessness in any given year.  I am assuming most everyone reading this has a home.  But can you imagine not?