Growin' Up In The 70's

I received an email with the picture above recently and it got me thinking about the 1970’s.  That was my time...aged 4-14.  It was a great era to grow up in and this picture perfectly captures that time.  We had long hair, parted in the middle, and carefully feathered back with large blue or black 'Goody' combs.  We wore cut-off tee-shirts, short jean-shorts, and yes we jumped everything.  We did a lot of stupid crazy stuff, but jumping stuff was huge because Evel Knievel was doing his thing back then jumping over fountains, cars, buses, and of course his rocket-cycle attempt over the Snake River Canyon in 1974.

I still remember where I was on that weird day...in my friend Greg Felson’s living-room watching on TV with his disgusted dad when Evel’s jump failed miserably.  But whenever Evel would do one of his jumps on ABC’s 'Wide World Of Sports' it was all we could talk about at school.  We also had Fonzi from 'Happy Days' who cashed in on the Evel craze in that 2-part episode in 1975 when he jumped over 14 trashcans on his motorcycle.  All of us kids were glued to the TV for those Happy Day’s episodes.  I don't know if the whole jumping thing was a nation-wide craze or not but it was huge where I lived.  Well, KISS, jumping bikes...and Wacky-Packages.  Remember those?  Huge.

My younger friend Jimmy used to jump his Big-Wheel like in the picture above, but all of us bigger kids jumped our pedal dirt-bikes.  We would put jumps anywhere and everywhere.  Just grab a shovel and make a dirt jump in the field, or a log and a piece of scrap wood and we were in business jumping on the road.  Or we would put the jump in the ditch and get a good fast start on the road before gliding down into the ditch jump.

And of course we were jumping over things...boxes, rocks, logs, garbage cans or anything we could get our hands on.  One time my mom came down from the house to the road to check on my little brother Nate only to find him obediently laying in the ditch with us taking turns jumping our bikes over him.  She made us stop that.  We would jump in the winter too.  We had a corn field across the street from my long, steep driveway so we would put a ramp on the road, tear down the driveway as fast as we could on our bikes, hit the jump and fly 25-30 feet in the air landing in the deep snow.  We didn't care if we stuck the landing because it was just as much fun to land and flip over the handlebars into the soft snow.

We were into doing some stupid sh*t, and yes we would get hurt.  I remember one trick we would do was to see how many people we could get onto one bike...like a guy on the handlebars, a guy standing up peddling, another two guys on the seat and maybe a guy standing on the back wheel peg.  Then we would go as fast as we could down a large hill by my house.  Lots of scraped and bloody knees over the years.  Jimmy's older brother Scott got a dislocated shoulder from a jump, and I still have a scar on my right knee from skeeching.

This cool trick we called 'skeeching' would take place in the winter when there was freshly fallen snow on the road.  We would get off the school bus one stop early, run around to the back of the bus and then hold on to the bumper.  The bus would then pull you down the road while you held on for dear life, gliding on your boots with snow spraying up into your face.  It was exhilarating and you felt cool with the kids on the back of the bus cheering you on, but one time I hit an unseen pot-hole and went head over heels rolling down the road at 30 mph.  My jeans were ripped to shreds and my knee was a bloody mess.  I had to tell my mom that I slipped and fell on some ice.

That was painful, but nothing other than our shattered nerves got hurt the time we were at the top of a large grain tower.  We used to climb up the ladder on the outside of this tall concrete container and sit on the sheet-metal dome on top and check out the view.  We could see for miles around and it was a good place to hang out and feel cool.  One afternoon me and Aaron Vermillion were sitting up there and the metal top collapsed from our weight!  That was not cool.  It did not collapse all the way, but the top turned from a dome into a bowl and the sudden 6-foot drop scared the living crap out of us.

A neat game we would play was 'Rock-Tag'.  Before my dad had it paved, our driveway was made up of golf-ball sized rocks.  Towards the end of summer when the corn was grown over our heads my friends and I would break up into two teams.  One team would stand at the end of my driveway and the other team would disperse into the corn field across the street.  The team in the driveway armed with rocks would yell "Marco!" and each player in the corn field would have to yell "Polo!" while tossing an ear of corn into the air.  That would signal your position so that the 'Driveway' team could then throw rocks into your general vicinity hoping to hit you.  The trick of course if you were in the field was to toss up your corn and then break into a sprint to avoid the rocks.  Your adrenaline would just skyrocket when the rocks were raining down around you.  Fortunately only a few of us ever got hit, but we quit playing after Scott took a shot to the head and was bleeding.

So many fun, stupid things.  One afternoon me, Gary Paulson, Aaron and a couple others were hanging out in the loft of an old abandoned barn down the street.  There was a long thick rope hanging down from the ceiling that we used to swing on into the hay below.  Suddenly Aaron reached out with his lighter and lit the bottom of the rope on fire, to be funny I guess.  Of course the flame started climbing up the rope.  "Holy sh*t!!"  Aaron grabbed a two-by-four and wacked the fiery end of the rope hoping to knock out the flames.  He stopped the rope-fire but in the process sent sparks flying everywhere starting at least a half dozen smaller fires in the hay.  We were all running around like crazy stomping out the fires.  A couple of them got fairly big and I remember thinking that the whole place was going to go up and it was going be one huge fire and oh-my-god we were going to get into so much trouble...but eventually we managed to get all the fires out and then we got the hell out of there.

I guess the stupid stuff we did as kids in the 70’s paved the way for the even stupider stuff we did as teenagers in the 80’s (as outlined a few weeks ago in my blog entry ‘Down By The River’).  The 70's were a fun time to grow up in though.  Bike helmets had not been invented yet, we collected baseball cards religiously and never put them in the spokes of our tires, we listened to Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 every week, other than PBS we only had 3 channels on TV, and we did not have video games until ‘Pong’ came along in the late 70’s...but we sure had a lot of fun.  Thanks Mom for letting us be stupid kids.

STD

It was the summer of 1986.  I was home from my 2^nd year of college working a summer job in Waukesha, WI at a butcher shop.  It was a horrible, smelly job cutting and preparing meat.  For the entire summer the faint aroma of blood and meat was always with me, no matter how many showers I took.  I could not for the life of me scrub the blood smell off (out damn spot!).  Consequently, every morning as soon as the sun would come up and shine through the windows at my parent's house two things would happen:  the room I was sleeping in would get very hot...and the houseflies would descend upon me, landing on my face while I was trying to sleep.  There was no air conditioning so I then had to decide between hiding under the covers away from the flies while roasting, or going without covers but feeling the tickle of flies crawling all over my face and arms.  It totally sucked and neither option allowed me to get much sleep that summer anytime after 5:00 a.m.

And while we are mentioning sucky memories about that job, remember Damien the 5-foot Ball Python from my last blog entry?  One Friday afternoon that summer I was taking him to the vet and he got loose in my car.  I did not know if he had escaped the car completely or was under the dashboard or inside the seats or what.  I looked for him all weekend but could not find him.  When I went to work that Monday morning it was hot so I cracked the windows a bit in case Damien was still in there.  When I came outside on break a few hours later I looked in the car…there he was curled up on the front seat, but not moving.  I had cooked him.  I ran him into the meat cooler and tried to cool him down but it was too late…he was dead and I had to bury him the back yard at my girlfriend Lona’s house.  Sorry old friend.  I rebounded though and bought a new python, Damien II.  He lasted a couple of years but then he went on an 8-month fast.  He would not eat and I got scared that he was going to die so I sold him back to the pet store.  Then I bought Damien III, The Final Chapter.  He was with me for several years until I moved to Minneapolis in 1997 and sold him to a friend.  Then a few years later I bought my current Ball Python and her name is Annakiya which means ‘Sweet Face’ in the language from the area of Africa which she hails from.

Anyways, let’s get back to the story.  For several days at work I had been noticing I was getting itchy down below.  Not the normal guy itch were you occasionally have to adjust and itch…but really itchy and getting worse.  I found myself sneaking off into the meat locker to be by myself just so I could itch the hell out of it.  Oh no…what is this?  We had no Internet back then to look this stuff up.  What is wrong with me?  That question was answered for me on day 3 of my mad itching in the form of Lona showing up at the butcher shop crying.  She had just came from her annual ob/gyn appointment and was told that she had chlamydia.  She was 18, I was 20, and I was the only guy she had ever been with, so obviously I gave it to her.  Uh oh.

She told me that a guy can have it for up to a year before the symptoms show up, so we reasoned that I must have got it the summer before when I was with another girl.  So the crying stopped and she told me that I needed to go in and get tested.  Okay, fine…anything to stop this itching I thought.  I had no real idea of what ‘getting tested’ meant.  I just assumed I would go in and the doctor would look at my weiner and say:  “Yep, you’ve got chlamydia, here’s a pill, now get out of here you little scamp.”  Or maybe at worst they would have to take a blood test.

But no, that is not how they do it.  As per usual at a doctor’s office I waited and waited in the big room until they finally called my name.  I was led back to my own private room and told to take my pants off.  Okay, cool, no blood sample…they just want to look at my little friend.  A tad bit embarrassing, but no big deal.  I waited some more until suddenly Beulah Balbricker walked in with a nasty look on her face.  Do you remember Beulah Balbricker from the movie Porky’s?  That is exactly what this woman looked like.  Short, wide, and with a very sour disposition like she would rather be anywhere than here with you.  Well when I saw what she had in her hand my heart skipped a beat, I started to sweat and I shared her feelings of wanting to be anywhere but here.

She was carrying 2 thin sticks about 10 inches long each.  One was silvery metal and one was wood and they each had a cotton tip.  Wait a minute…those aren’t for…she can’t possibly…there is no way…not in my...no...please...no.  “What are you going to do with those?”, I stammered.  She was about 4 ½ feet tall and she looked up at me and growled:  “We need to take two samples.”  Dear god in heaven no.  Not my tallywacker.

I tried to reason with her.  I explained that my girlfriend has chlamydia...I am the only guy she has ever been with...therefore I obviously have it too so there is no need to test me for it.  Just give me the f*cking pill.  She shook her head and told me that without a positive test they cannot prescribe me the pill.  There did not seem to be any way out of this and she ordered me to drop my boxers.  Then she reached for my weiner but I was as un-turned on as I have ever been in my entire life.  Like a scared turtle my johnson was hiding from Beulah and he did not want any part of her or her sadistic sticks of death.

Noticing my incredibly flaccid state, she then began tugging on him...trying to "firm him up a bit" is how she put it.  She was the perfect height for the job and she took it seriously.  She was tugging on my wiener with one hand and trying to jab the metal stick up me with the other hand.  It hurt and I was starting to freak out.  She got maybe a half inch in and I gasped:  "How far do you have to go?!"  She paused, held up her finger to show me for reference and said grimly:  “Two knuckles deep.”  Then she went back to work.

That was it.  I lost it.  My vision started to get spotty and grey and I began to faint.  I had been standing in front of her but when my legs gave out I fell back into an examining table.  As I began to slide down to the floor Beulah reached over and bear-hugged me to hold me up.  As my vision slowly came back I realized that my descent into hell was complete.  I was standing in a doctor's office naked from the waist down locked in an embrace with a short, fat, ornery woman who was determined to do great personal harm to my penis.

She had me sit on the table and when she decided that I was not going to fall over she let me go.  I told her that this was not going to happen...there was no way she was going to stick anything up in me anymore...and that I would rather live the rest of my life with the itch than go through any more of that.  She looked at me long and hard and must have decided it wasn't worth it to try anymore, so she said:  “Fine.” and walked out.  I don't know if she fudged the charts or what, but after getting dressed and walking back to the main room the lady at the front desk handed me a prescription.  I believe it was for just one pill.  I took it and the chlamydia was gone.  Easy come, easy go.

The reason I remembered this story is because the other morning I was driving to work listening to the "Half-Assed Morning Show" on 93X with Weasel, Josh & Nick.  They were asking for people to call in with painful stories of gonorrhea or syphilis.  I didn't have either of those, but I thought my chlamydia story might be a good one so I called in.  Sure enough, I was told to hang on and about 5 minutes later I was on the air!  The whole chlamydia thing was not a good experience, but it was fun being on the radio.  We talked for 5 or 6 minutes and had some laughs.  Nick commented that I had been sexually abused by Beulah with all that weiner-tugging, but that it was kind of cool and it maybe would have turned him on.  He could not have been more wrong.

The funny thing was that my wife Nadia and I work together and usually drive together, but she was going to have to stay late that day so we took separate cars.  She was in her car listening to 93X, but I guess my voice sounded different on the radio because she did not even realize it was me.  She said she was listening to the story and feeling sorry for whoever ended up with that guy, and then when she got to work I asked her if she had heard me on the radio.  She stopped, stared at me for a second, and then the light bulb went on.  She rolled her eyes, sighed and said:  “Oh man…of course that was you.”

Down By The River

Disclaimer:  I do not condone any of the things I mention below; and Mom – definitely do NOT read this particular blog entry.  Okay, well, it was the fall of 1984 and it was time to go off to college so I moved from my parent’s house in Waukesha, WI to the Pioneer Hall dorm on campus at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.  It is right on the East River Road overlooking the Mississippi River.  I did not know anybody when I moved in, but in the dorms it was easy to make friends and pretty soon I had a fairly cool crew of guys I would hang with.  One of my favorite things to do was to hang out on the banks of the Mississippi.

The first guy I met at the dorms was Reinhart (Reiney) Simpson who was in the neighboring Frontier Hall.  Then he introduced me to Ron Bronson and the rest of the guys from his dorm, as well as Sean Morrison from his hometown who was now hanging in Minneapolis.  The first day Reiney introduced me to Sean, Reiney was busy for the day so he said that Sean and I should just hang out.  We clicked the moment we met.  I worked in the dorm cafeteria and I thought he might be hungry so I brought him some sandwiches.  Sean in turn had some acid and he offered me some.  We had nothing to do all day so we each took a hit and went down to the river.  We then spent the next 8 hours climbing around the banks of the river, exploring the winding river and getting to know each other.  Sean is the closest thing I have ever met to Jim Morrison in person…full of life but wild, crazy and reckless...somehow managing to stay alive while always on the edge.  He is the catalyst for countless crazy nights and you will see his name again.  He stood up in my first wedding and we still hang out after almost 3 decades.

The river flats down below the dorm was a good place to study, but also to meet girls.  I used to wrap my 5 foot Ball Python ‘Damien’ around my neck and go down to the river with my school books.  Before long a girl would notice Damien and would come over wanting to know:  Is he real? Will he bite? Is he poisonous? Can I touch him?  Of course I was more than happy to let the girls touch my snake.  But in addition to being a place to meet people, the river banks were a great place to come down with your friends and smoke pot and hang out.  One warm, sunny afternoon in the spring of 1985 Ron and I were down by the river passing a joint when we noticed off to our left a big white blob of snow and ice about the size of a large pumpkin.  We looked all around and it was the only snow you could see anywhere.  It was the very last of the last of the snow from that winter.  So we finished our joint, dug up the ice boulder, carried it down to the river, and ceremoniously dumped it in thus officially ending winter in Minneapolis.

Almost from the beginning we also took to exploring...the banks, the cliffs and soon the undersides of the bridges over the Mississippi.  The Franklin Avenue bridge, the I-94 bridge, the Washington Avenue bridge, 10^th Avenue bridge, 35-W bridge, Stone Arch Bridge, etc.  Most of the bridges had some sort of metal gate, fence or barrier to discourage people from climbing them, but they were all fairly easily bypassed by climbing over or around them.  The toughest one was the I-94 bridge.  The only entrance on to that bridge was blocked by a thick sheet of metal that stuck out several feet over a drop-off that was a good 20 to 30 feet.  It was manageable for a guy to climb around, but tough for a smaller girl.  One night we had Mark Smith’s girlfriend Mindy dangling over the edge as we passed her around the barrier…from me on land to Mark on the bridge on the other side of the barrier.  It was hard but for some reason she completely trusted us and we managed to get her safely up on the bridge.

Once safely around whatever barrier the bridge had to offer we would climb out on the stone or metal or concrete arches and trestles that made up the undersides of the bridges.  But making it past the barrier did not mean that you were safe as there were catwalks to maneuver, concrete slopes to address, slick panels to hang on to and gaps to jump.  It was always an adventure.  One winter afternoon I was coming back from class, walking on the Washington Avenue bridge on top of the bridge the way you were supposed to and I saw some commotion up ahead.  A bunch of people were looking over the edge of the railing down to the river below.  I looked down and there was a body with a dark circle around it laying on the ice that was jutting out from the shore.  Suicide.  For some reason the image of that dead person fallen from the bridge did not translate to what could happen to me if I climbed under the bridges.  It was exciting and dangerous and we were extremely high above the water, but when you were 18 or 19 you had that feeling of invincibility and you had absolutely no feeling that you could die.

Case in point…have you ever seen the vampire movie ‘The Lost Boys’ with Kiefer Sutherland, Jason Patric, and Corey Haim?  There was a scene in the movie where all the vampires are casually hanging under a bridge by their fingertips.  I thought that looked like a lot of fun so one night Mark and I were under the I-94 bridge and I decided to try it.  This bridge is all metal beams so I lowered myself over the edge of the bottom of an I-beam and hung there for awhile, looking around and taking it all in from this unique vantage point…nothing but my fingertips holding me up a hundred feet over the middle of the Mississippi River.  I was fearless and nothing could hurt me...but in addition to Mark urging me to come back up my fingers starting getting tired.  So I pulled myself back up on to the beam, heart pounding with exhilaration.

Rain or shine or snow, it didn’t matter…pretty soon we were addicted to exploring the riverbanks and bridges and we were out there every chance we could.  I remember hanging out with Reinhart in a small cave we had found during a pounding torrential rainstorm.  Granted we were tripping, but the lightning show that night was the most vivid and intense I had ever seen.  We were safe and warm and dry in our little cave looking out at almost constant lightning flashes over the river and the city in the background for several hours.  Another time Reiney and I were down by the river at the cave and we drank a bunch of ‘Mad Dog 20-20’ fortified wine, again in a rainstorm.  We got pretty drunk and the tricky part was trying to climb back up the steep cliff to the top to civilization.  The rain had turned the dirt and rock cliff into a slick mudslide which made it nearly impossible to climb, especially drunk.  Well we finally made it almost all the way to the top of the cliff.  Sensing victory I relaxed for a second and suddenly started to slide back down over the edge.  Just asI was about to plummet all the way down the cliff Reiney grabbed my jacket collar and hung on till I was able to secure my footing and get back up.  He saved my life that night…thanks Reiney.

In the winter we would go under the Franklin Avenue bridge where a huge storm drain lets the city’s water run-off into the river in a big waterfall.  Of course it would mostly freeze in the winter forming a huge, beautiful frozen waterfall.  It was slick and dangerous but fun to climb into the ice caves high above the river.  Another extremely fun/stupid trick we would pull on the arch bridges would be to ‘ski’ on our shoes down the concrete arches as low as we could, stopping just above the point of no return as the arch would gradually get steeper and steeper the further down you went.  It never happened, but the threat was that if you went too far you would just keep sliding till you were free-falling down to the water.

Another facet to exploring the riverbanks opened up to us one night when we were climbing around and came upon a mysterious opening in the side of the steep hill.  What’s this?  There was a metal gate over the concrete opening but we found that we could contort our bodies and slip past it.  It was a round concrete tunnel about 4 feet high with water running through it about 6 to 12 inches deep.  Cool!  So we ran back to the dorms and got flashlights and a whole new underground world was opened up to us.  It turns out there are miles of tunnels under the University of Minnesota crisscrossing all over campus, some concrete, some wooden and some dirt.  After many trips in there we eventually got to know most of them by heart…all of the various turns, cross-tunnels, stairs, shafts, and elevators. 

Our experience came in handy the time we only had one flashlight and my buddy Ron dropped it into the water.  Much of the inner-inner tunnels had some lighting from hanging light bulbs, but that long narrow water drain exit/entrance that we used to get in and out was not lit.  Luckily we were only a couple hundred feet in and we were able to feel our way back out.  After many nights of exploring we eventually found an entrance into one of the campus buildings that was built many floors deep underground.  If we did not feel like going back through the tunnels to the riverbank and getting our feet wet again, we could open up a ceiling panel into the hallway of the building and drop down and we would be in the real world again.  We would then just take an elevator back up to the surface and be done for the night.

Yes the riverbanks provided us with several years and countless nights of entertainment but it all came to a screeching halt one sad night.  Like any other night me, Mark Smith, my girlfriend Lona and our roommate Claudia Tribbiani hopped on our motorcycles with a small amount of acid and a large bottle of wine and went down to the river.  We decided to hang out on the west bank under the I-94 bridge.  We were still on land but under the bridge when we heard a bunch of voices and a beer bottle came crashing down near us.  We walked up on to the West River Road that ran under the bridge and there were a bunch of guys yelling and running down from the bridge towards us.  Mark and Lona ran to our bikes to make sure they were okay, while Claudia and I just stood there waiting to see what they wanted.  Well…they were skinheads and what they wanted was to beat up me and Mark.

The first guy took a swing at my face and missed, and then another guy swung a beer bottle at my head and missed.  I was ducking and weaving and it was time to go, so Claudia and I ran up to where the bikes were with the skinheads on my trail.  They didn't care about the girls, they just wanted Mark and I.  There were 6 of them and they couldn’t catch me, but Mark was sitting on his bike and he got punched and knocked off his bike.  I could easily outrun any of these f*ckheads in their big black boots, but I couldn’t leave Mark alone so with 3 guys on my trail I circled back to help Mark.  I tripped, fell to the ground and they were on me, kicking and punching me while one guy broke a full beer bottle over my head.  Luckily an old man in the house right behind us had seen all of this and called the cops, so when the sirens came the skinheads scattered like the cockroaches they are.  We were all bloody so an ambulance came and took us to the hospital...bleeding and tripping.  This was about midnight and we were there at the hospital waiting to get stitched up most of the rest of the night.

Getting beat up sucked enough on its own, but the worst part was that it made me deathly afraid to go down to the river anymore.  We tried it one other time and I was so nervous that it was just not any fun.  My head was on a swivel and I was jumping at every noise thinking it was a pack of skinheads coming to get us.  My college career of hanging down by the Mississippi River was over, but we had a good run.  Although we stupidly defied death countless times, we had a blast and the memories of our adventures are always with me of those fun, carefree times when the river was ours and we did not realize we had any limitations.

Small Town Life

Well since we were just talking in the last blog entry about me cooking my sunglasses at 400 degrees for 15 minutes in the summer of 2008, let's move on chronologically to a couple of weeks later.  It was the weekend of 7/25-7/27/08 and my favorite band the Radiators were promising to cook our brains at 100+ degrees for hours on end each night.  The schedule called for the Rads to play Friday night at the 'Stones Throw' bar in Eau Claire, WI.  On Saturday night they moved down the freeway to the 'Miramar Theatre' in Milwaukee, WI.  Then on Sunday they would wind up the “I-94 Tour” at the 'Taste Of Lincoln Avenue' in Chicago, IL.

They came out of the gates strong in Eau Claire with "Law Of The Fish", and then kept hammering us for 2 ½ hours of sweaty fun with tons of favorites including the whole "Love Is A Tangle/Jessica/Lonesome Whistle/Chevy '39" medley before closing the show with my all-time favorite Rads jam - the full "Hardcore" medley.  Speaking of getting hammered, my wife Nadia and I had arrived in Eau Claire from Minneapolis at 2:00 pm and the show did not start until 10:30 pm so we were pretty loose after 8 ½ hours of heavy drinking with all of our friends.  I remember the show well though and they cooked that little place.  It was a small stage with Reggie the bass player tucked back next to Frankie the drummer and they rocked it.  All of the usual Minneapolis folks were there including Mitch and Kara Manson, Ted and Polly Booker, Mike and Allison Spicoli, Bonnie & Clyde, Tommy the Freak, Fred Wong, Robin Miller...and the extremely hot/extremely cool Nancy Osbourne from Wausau, WI.

Nancy had kicked off the party with us in the hotel bar when we first arrived and we just kept going strong from there...right through the afternoon in the hotel, the pre-concert catered birthday celebration for Mike Spicoli at the Stones Throw, the concert, and the post-concert hotel-room party till sun-up.  Somehow Nadia and I managed to get dressed and stumble down to the hotel bar in the morning and had breakfast with the Radiator's manager Joey Abelson.  Then we wearily got in the car to make the 4 hour drive down to Milwaukee.  When we got to the on-ramps for I-94 we looked at each other with raised eyebrows...should we bag the Milwaukee show?  Take the I-94 West ramp and just go home and go to bed?  No way!  But it would feel so good...should we?  Could we?  We could...no, no we couldn't.  We took the I-94 East ramp and forged ahead.

We made the right decision of course as the Radiators put on a great show in Milwaukee in the hot little Miramar Theatre.  Most of the Minneapolis crew did not make the trek down, so we met up with our Milwaukee crew consisting of Mike Murphy, Giggling Joe, Baby-doll Steve and their three wives, as well as Special Kaye and Travelin' Dave.

(Quick side note on how Baby-doll Steve got his name.  I dubbed him that after hearing the story about the time him and his wife were hosting a party.  Steve heard his baby crying so he went back to the bedroom to soothe the child.  He brought the baby cradled in his arms out to the living room where the rest of the grownups were hanging out, but as he entered the room he promptly tripped and pitched the kid headfirst into the corner of the coffee table.  Except that it was just a baby-doll, not the real thing.  Gasps and screams were let out until it was apparent that Steve had brought out a baby-doll instead of his baby.  The men all laughed, but for some reason the women did not think it was at all funny.)

Anyways, we all had a blast hanging out and dancing to more extreme Radiation.  Fittingly, the Rads opened with "Long Hard Journey Home" and then played a bunch of favorites including a killer "Solitary Man" before encoring with a crazy "Evil/Spoonful" jam.  We had to miss the Sunday Chicago show for work reasons, but that was okay with us as the two late nights were already going to make for a long, tough ride back home to Minneapolis.

On the way back we needed a snack so we pulled over in Foster, WI at the 'Foster Cheese House' and bought a couple of ice cream cones and a bag of cheese curds from an absolutely enormous pair of women working behind the counter.  There are only 2 things of note in Foster besides these two humongous ladies...the cheese house that surrounds their 400 lb frames and the gas station next to it.  According to Wikipedia, the population is 95 with 1.3 people per square mile.  One would think there is not much happening in Foster, but one would be wrong.  When we went back outside we heard all this commotion just down the road about a quarter mile so we drove over to see what was going on.

What was going on though was not readily apparent.  There were a bunch of weird machines cruising around making an extraordinary amount of noise, but what where they?  Strange little cars?  Four-wheelers?  No, wait...are those lawnmowers??  Yep, but they were not mowing grass.  They were drag racing and it looked like at least half the population of Foster was in attendance.  There were whole families with coolers of beers sitting on their blankets, hanging in the beer tent, or watching from the bleachers. They had a rickety old wooden sun-faded bleacher set up for fans to sit in next to this short 100 yard-long dead-end street.  It was the goofiest thing I had ever seen so we had to get out of the car and check it out.

We parked on a side street about 50 feet from the finish line and were about to cross the main street but we noticed they had set up a 20-foot long string barrier with a sign on one end that said:  "Entrance fee - $4.00".  Entrance fee?  Really?  Entrance to what, the other side of the road?  So we just stood there on our side of the street and waited for the next race.  There was a guy in an "Events Staff" t-shirt with a green flag and a red flag and he stood at the finish line and suddenly waved his flags like crazy.  Then two insanely loud lawn mowers with huge 8-cylinder engines and five-foot long exhaust pipes came flying down the street while all the drunk Fosteronians cheered madly.  After they crossed the finish line the flag-guy furiously waved his flags again while everyone went nuts.

We decided to take a couple pictures of the next race and then take off, but one of the racers must have been perturbed that we were on the wrong side of the street taking pictures.  After crossing the finish line he didn't slow down but instead came barreling right at us.  I had just snapped a picture and was still looking through the viewfinder when I realized he was coming for us.  We both jumped out of the way behind our car just before he turned away at the last second.  I thought he was going to kill us with that maniacal look on his face as he was bearing down on us with his foot-long beard flapping in the wind.  We decided it was time to get the hell out of there and head home.  Apparently another typical summer Sunday afternoon in Foster, WI, but we'd had enough.

The picture above is from that day in Foster.  Note the flag guy with his "Event Staff" t-shirt, the people hanging out, and the old bleachers that are about to cave in.  The lawn mower crossing the finish line is the guy who's attempt at vehicular manslaughter scared the crap out of us.  I can only assume that he was annoyed that we had not contributed to the entrance fee, which I am sure came directly out of his beer fund.  I wish I had gotten a picture of the ‘entrance gate’, which is just to the right of this picture.  It was a folding card table with the back of a beer case taped to it that said:  "Entrance fee - $4.00".  You got to love small-town life, making the most out of what you got.

Things That I Have Wrecked

It was 4 years ago this month.  Nadia and I had just came back from our honeymoon in Jamaica and we were craving something simple to eat after spending a week gorging on the lavish all-you-can eat buffets and fancy sit-down dinners at the many restaurants that the Sandals Resort had to offer.  I actually gained 10 pounds the week we were there but that was okay…the waist is a terrible thing to mind.  Our first night back home we decided on a simple frozen pizza so I put it in the oven and went upstairs.  I came back down after about 15 minutes and something was terribly wrong.  The whole place wreaked like chemicals and I assumed the oven was on fire so I ran over to take the pizza out.  I could not see any smoke or fire, but in the bottom of the oven was a dark greenish gooey plastic glob with some twisted orange streaks running through…it was kind of cool and it looked like art but I had no idea what the hell it was or how it got there.  Nadia and I stared at it for about 5 minutes but could not figure it out so we threw it away.

A few days later I realized (as is the norm) that I could not find my expensive sunglasses.  I am the poster-child for ZZ Top’s ‘Cheap Sunglasses’ song…I constantly lose my shades so I just buy cheap $5 pairs whenever I see them on sale at gas stations or wherever.  This one time however I owned a sweet pair of $100 shades that Nadia had won as part of a golf package from the United Way auction that we have at work every fall.  So normally I wouldn’t care that I had lost my shades, but these were the only nice expensive pair that I had ever owned.  We looked all over the house, cars, work, everywhere till, duh…it finally dawned on me that the cool plastic gob of goo in the oven was my cool shades.  When I am not wearing my shades I often hook them onto the front of my shirt, and when I bent over to put the pizza in they must have slid off into the oven.  Strange that I didn’t hear them fall.  Ah well…live and learn.  In particular I learned that it is not a good idea to cook your shades at 400 degrees for 15 minutes.  They don’t like that.

Over the years I have wrecked a variety of things.  I never mean to, but sometimes things just get wrecked.  If you read my 1/17/12 blog entry ‘Another Reason Why You Shouldn’t Warm Up Your Car’ you know about a couple of them…like my Dad’s 1973 Opel Kadett and his 1982 Pontiac Bonneville.  The Opel was wrecked beyond repair, but actually the Pontiac went into the shop and came out crisp and clean with a new grill, hood and front quarter-panels. 

The Pontiac’s pristine condition did not last very long however, as a few weeks after it’s revival I was driving it down I-94 from Waukesha to Milwaukee, WI.  I was behind a semi-truck when suddenly it ran over a tailpipe that was laying in the road.  The back tire ran over the end of it and kicked it up in the air.  I remember perfectly almost like it was in slow motion, the tailpipe spinning end over end and tracking right for my head as we sped towards each other at 65 mph.  There was no time to do anything but instinctively duck as the twisted hunk of metal crashed into the windshield right in front of my face.  The glass bent, cracked, spider-webbed…but it did not break and the tailpipe bounced off after doing its work, ready to wreak havoc on the next poor b*stard.  I believe it was my sister Jan who was with me in the front seat and it scared the crap out of us but we were fine.  I just remember thinking how glad I was to be in a car and not my motorcycle or it would have taken my head off.

That was not the only windshield that suffered under my care.  Before the ’82 Bonneville there was a brown 1978 Plymouth Volare stick-shift station wagon that my mom and dad hated…we called it the ‘Vo-Lemon’.  The “Volare” nameplate fell off on the way home from the dealer, which was just the first of dozens of problems with that piece of junk.  It was truly an awful car, but it was the first car I had ever driven so I have some fond memories of it.  Well…again…I am too old for my dad to ground me so I might as well come clean on how the windshield got busted on that thing.  When I was 16 my friend Aaron Vermillion and I and a couple other friends took the Vo-Lemon to the Waukesha County Fair for the night.  We had a great time, met some girls, probably had some beers…the usual.  It was a great time and Aaron was pumped.  He was a very hyper guy and when it was time to leave we got in the car and he got in the passenger side and let out a huge yell and punched the windshield in happiness.  Crack!!  The whole thing splintered.  Dammit!  He did not mean to break the windshield though so for Aaron’s sake I had to lie and tell my parents that we didn’t know how it got cracked…that we got back to the car and somebody must have broke it while we were at the fair.   My dad has a huge brain and knows just about everything, so I figured he would somehow figure out that it was broken from the inside, not the outside.  But I guess not because he got it fixed and never said anything.  Sorry Dad.

Another car that I wrecked was almost completely my fault.  For a couple of years in the mid-1990’s I owned a sweet lime-green 1974 Dodge Dart Swinger.  I got it for only $500 from my ex-wife Lona’s grandpa and it was in mint condition.  After buying it new in ’74 he basically just drove it to the grocery store and church and it only had 50,000 miles on it.  Remember the scene in ‘The Jerk’ when the crazy guy starts shooting at Steve Martin at the gas station and he says:  “He hates these cans!”?  If you look closely, you will see a yellow ’74 Dodge Dart Swinger slowly drive by in the scene.  That’s my car.  Anyways, in the late summer of 1997 on a Sunday afternoon I was heading down I-94 East from my girlfriend Mugsy’s house in Minneapolis, MN to my house in Madison, WI.  I was 20 minutes past the Wisconsin border and still had 3 hours to go, but we’d just had a great weekend and I was feeling great.  I was cruising along about 70 mph, listening to my new live ‘Doors’ cd on the stereo and plowing through a bagful of Burger King cheeseburgers on my lap while reading the cd insert. 

In other words I was paying zero attention to the road and just humming happily along when all of a sudden: ‘BLAMMO!!’  I had no idea what was happing, but the entire car was up on two wheels.  The two tires on the passenger side were still on the ground but me and the rest of the car were high in the air with the car on a 45 degree angle.  We hung there for a bit and then ‘THUMP!’ the car came back down on all 4 wheels and started fishtailing all over the road.  There were cheeseburgers and soda and cd’s and cassette tapes flying all over the inside of the car as I grabbed the steering wheel and fought to bring the poor thing under control.  I ended up on the left shoulder of the freeway and pulled over as much as I could so the cars whizzing past me would not be a factor.

However the center median of this stretch of the freeway was a deep gully that dropped off almost immediately so I couldn’t pull over too far.  Still not having the slightest idea of what had just happened I opened the driver door and attempted to step out.  I put my left foot down and tried to stand up but it was such a steep angle that my ankle gave way and I rolled all the way down the hill about 20 feet to the bottom.  As I laid in the ditch on my back with a sprained ankle and a totaled car, I stared up into the sky and the first thing to came to my head was:  “Why has my god has forsaken me?”  In other words, what the f*ck just happened?!  All of a sudden some old dude’s head comes into view and he bends over me and asks if I am alright.  I rolled over, got up, and then hopped/crawled up the hill till I get to my car and surveyed the damage.  Both tires on the driver side were flat, and the whole car was on a weird sideways angle.  The car wasn’t a rectangle anymore…it was a parallelogram.

I still had no idea what had happened, so the old man pointed first to his large mobile home parked on the right shoulder of the freeway, and then to a huge spare tire laying in the ditch behind me.  The spare had come loose from the back of his mobile home and had been laying in the middle of the freeway.  He was parked and was trying to come grab the thing out of the road when I came along and hit it flush with my front left tire which catapulted the left half of my car up in the air.  Such a shame…it was a sweet car but the whole undercarriage was completely bent beyond repair.  I somehow got the insurance company to give me $1,000 for it though.  Twice what I paid, but I still would have rather had the car.

I have wrecked a lot of other cars, boats, hotel rooms, houses and relationships since then but I will spare you any more details for now.  As I said I never mean to, but sh*t happens.  You just have to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, accept the consequences and learn from your mistakes.  Have a great weekend ya’ll and try not to wreck too many brain cells.

Those Mysterious Little Creatures

I was just talking on the phone to my friend Marci Benton and for some reason the conversation steered towards her upcoming annual OB/GYN appointment.  She mentioned how sometimes complications can arise down there with an abnormal Pap test.  Not usually, but you never know.  I said:  “Yeah, they’re mysterious little creatures.”  That cracked us both up for some reason, and then it got me thinking about the very first time I encountered one of those mysterious creatures as a teenager.  It was attached to a beautiful neighbor girl named Holly Owen.

I did not lose my virginity that time, and thank god…I was completely clueless and had no idea what I was doing.  This was back in the early 80’s when stuff was a lot hairier.  I mean, a lot hairier.  Let me give you an example.  I have a friend named Glenn Kampson who fondly tells the story of the night he was with a girl who was so hairy that when he was down there, he fell asleep.  Granted they had been drinking, but he actually laid his head down and fell fast asleep on the ample pile of soft comfortable hair that was in front of him.  He woke up to her poking him in the head asking him: “WTF?!”.  It was an unfortunate situation, but very understandable if you know Glenn, who is one of the funniest men in America.

So I remember my first time down there being a lesson in terror and uncertainty as I knew I was going to have to figure out what was imbedded in all that hair.  Sure I had seen pictures, but when actually confronted with a real live one right in my face I was scared shitless.  So much hair, so little experience.  I was as happy and excited as any normal red-blooded pubescent male could be, but what was I supposed to do?  I squinted hard and tried peering through all the hair but could see nothing that afforded me any clue as to what was going on in there.  Should I go high, low, right in the middle?  I did not want Holly to know that I had never been there before so I was going to have try and fake my way through this.  I steeled my resolve and got down to business.  I figured I wouldn’t taking any chances of missing the spot or spots I was supposed to hit, so I took my index finger and started poking anywhere there was hair.  Poke…poke…poke…poke…

After a minute or so of this I felt Holly move so I looked up to see if she was by now lost in sexual rapture at my prowess.  But she was not writhing in ecstasy.  She had propped herself up on her elbows and was staring at me like I was retarded.  She had a confused, somewhat sad look on her face.  Wait…maybe that’s how girls look when they are completely overwhelmed by pleasure??  Probably not.  As I continued poking I looked at her face for a sign that I was doing something right.  C’mon, help a guy out.  Something, anything.  There?  Is that good?  I anxiously implored her face for a clue or some positive sign.  Nope, nothing.

It was clear by now from her scowl that she was not having any fun and I was probably just annoying her.  I could tell she wanted me to do it right and I so badly wanted to do it right as well, but I didn’t even know what ‘right’ was?  I needed to retreat.  Regroup.  Get a safe distance away.  Back to the classroom.  But after spending a lifetime of trying to get into this exact position, I was not ready to give up yet.  I started frantically poking anywhere and everywhere now hoping to hit pay dirt…but eventually she just slowly shook her head, grabbed my hand and asked me to please stop.

It was over.  I was done.  My career as a stud had ended almost before it began.  How do you ever recover from such a complete and utter disaster as that?  It was a stunning defeat and I hoped this would never get out to my friends.  Fortunately, her inexperience kept her from realizing how much I completely sucked at this.  We knew something was horribly wrong but we did not know how to fix it, so we got dressed and pretended like nothing happened.

Eventually that summer we got up the courage to try it again though, with more and more success each time.  Of course there were some setbacks in the coming months...most notably the time Holly's large, menacing, extremely protective father came home early from his job at the liquor store that he owned.  In the words of Bob Seger, Holly and I were ‘working on our Night Moves’ when suddenly we hear the garage door opening.  What?!  Holy sh*t!  We froze and stared at each other in horror as we listened to his car pull into the garage.  I have to get out of here! 

We were upstairs in her bedroom so Holly bolted for the bathroom and I ran naked with an armload of clothes down the hallway to the split level staircase leading to the lower levels.  Half-way down the stairs was the entrance door from the garage, then the staircase did a 180 and the 2nd half of the stairs led to the lowest level.  From the top of the stairs I could hear him just on the other side of the door about to come in.  I could turn around and go hide back in Holly's room, but if I wasn’t home in time for dinner my parents would worry and I certainly didn't want to be trapped in there all night.  I decided I had to go for it and ran down the stairs towards him.  I passed the door and made the turn just as he came in and headed up the stairs to the upper level.  We were literally on the same staircase at the same time with him going up and me going down, but I made it to the bottom safely.  

I was far from being in the clear however.  I was still standing completely nude in the house of a card-carrying NRA gun enthusiast who was calling out to his beloved daughter letting her know he was home.  I heard her yell from the bathroom that she was about to take a bath.  I couldn't tell which was louder, my heart pounding in my chest or his heavy footsteps walking around on the floor above me.  Fighting the mixture of panic and adrenaline I gently eased open the sliding glass door leading to the back yard and made a run for my bicycle which was leaning up against their above-ground pool.  Still naked I grabbed my bike and pushed it around to the back side of the pool and crouched down low, all the while hoping he didn't happen to be looking out the back window.  I got dressed, threw my bike over the 6-foot high fence, climbed over after it, and then peddled as fast as my legs would go through the neighbor’s yard and headed for home, again hoping nobody was seeing any of this.

That was 30 years ago and I still have not figured out those mysterious little creatures. Since the dawn of time when that first horny cave-man tried to get with the cute little cave-girl who lived down the street, we have been trying in vain to figure out these creatures and the people they are attached to.  Wars have been waged, battles have been fought, and lives have been lost.  Large sums of money have been spent, countless songs have been written, and sturdy hearts have been broken.  They will drive men crazy and make us do inexplicit, incredibly stupid things at great risk.  But all that matters very little to the average male and I am no exception.  I was right back at Holly's house the next day after her dad came home.  My never-ending quest for knowledge and enlightenment on the subject continues to this day and my persistence is unwavering…just ask my poor wife.

T'was Never Thus

The Radiators (Rads) from New Orleans have been my favorite band since the first time I saw them in 1984 in Minneapolis, MN.  Oh sure over the years they came up against the Grateful Dead a few times and each time I chose seeing the Dead over the Rads just because, well...they were the Grateful Dead.  The magic those guys could weave on any given night was incredible and powerful, but not promised every night so you had to see as many shows as you could to make sure you did not miss one of the great nights.  I managed to see them exactly 100 times and most but not all were great shows.

With the Radiators however, you were practically guaranteed a great show every single night they went onstage.  The epic 3-set concerts they put on in the 1980's were a test of your endurance...just how much fun can one person handle, night after night?  That was up to you.  For me the Radiators were not only the backdrop to hundreds and hundreds of great nights, including my wedding to Nadia, but they were also a conduit to a huge network of life-long friends from all over the country.  I could post blog entries about nothing other than my weekends with the Radiators and never run out of material, but I will control myself.  The story below just popped into my head because it happened exactly 15 years ago to the day.

The Krewe of DAD's had arranged a pretty good 3-day weekend for the Radiators and their devoted fans that summer in Minnesota from 6/27-6/29/97.  The ‘DADs’ are a Krewe of extremely cool Minnesota folks who have been staging concert-parties here since 1982.  Most notably the annual Halloween costume balls that always prove to be an out-of-hand great time with The Radiators acting as the house band for those parties every year.  That is until sadly the Rads folded up the tent and shut down the band one year ago in June of 2011 after 33 1/3 years together.  The Krewe lives on without the Radiators and the Halloween bashes continue, but of course it is not quite the same without the Radiators.

The Friday night concert 15 years ago was a 90-minute drive south of us at the beautiful and friendly Harmony Park in Geneva, MN with a large outdoor stage in the woods and a lake right behind it.  Saturday night was scheduled for John Mackie's farm which was a 45-minute drive west of us in Waverly, MN...a large private gathering with ‘Twas Ever Thus’ as the party-theme.  This was the site of the famous ‘Between Two Fires’ bash three years earlier, with the outdoor stage set down at the bottom of a hill and a small river running behind it.  Then the mini-Minnesota tour continued on Sunday night in Apple Valley, MN with the Rads playing at the scenic Minnesota Zoo Amphitheater, another outdoor stage with a lake behind as a backdrop.

The Friday night gig on 6/27/97 was a great gathering of friends from all over the country, including one of my all-time best friends Special Kaye who drove up from Milwaukee, WI.  We all set up camp in the woods surrounding the stage at Harmony Park, with the party promising to go on all night after the concert.  Dave Ray and Tony Glover opened the show, and both their set and the Rad's long set were awesome.  The Radiator's encore of 'Out In The Woods' was appropriate and everybody left the stage area and drifted back to their campsites inebriated from the music.  The woods were dotted with campfires, and our group of close friends headed to the area that we dubbed 'Bookerville' with Ted Booker as the Mayor.  Ted and his wife Polly had rented a camper so we circled our tents around it.  It was a cool scene and the Radiator guitarists Dave Malone and Camile Baudoin even stuck around for a bit, hanging out in Ted's camper after the show. 

The next morning we wearily packed up our tents and drove back to Minneapolis to shower and get ready for the day's activities out in Waverly, another camping show at Mackie's farm.  This was the crown jewel of the weekend and expectations were especially high for those of us who were there for that crazy good time in 1994.  That first show there was on 7/16/94 and was one of the great nights of my life...it could be a whole 'nother story if I set my mind to it.  But basically the theme of the party that night was taken from a Radiators song “Between Two Fires” and there was literally 2 big bonfires on either side of the stage.  As the first set ended with the crowd pleasing “Wild And Free”, I watched Dave Malone jump off the stage, hop up on the hood of one of the band's rented Lincoln Town Cars and light up a cig.  I looked over at him with a huge smile and he smiled back screaming "Yeah baby!" at the top of his lungs while pumping his fists in joy from within his rising cloud of smoke.  This perfectly captured the mood of the entire scene, and the acid Mitch Manson and I had taken during the first set was happily starting to kick in.  The second set was buggy but great, and the night ended with the sun coming up on Mitch and I while we kicked the soccer ball over, through, and around all the tents set up in the field.

It was an all-around perfect night...however 3 years later on 6/28/97 the weather report was not good as rain was forecast with possibly severe weather.  I drove Mugsy Millen (this was a couple of weeks before we officially started going out for three long years) and a few other folks out from the city that afternoon and headed to Waverly.  We got about 10 miles away when the sky turned an ugly, creepy, dark greenish-gray.  The air was thick and eerily quiet, but then suddenly the wind, rain and hail hit.  We pulled into a gas station and waited it out for about 20 minutes until the craziness had mostly passed.

We got back on the road and continued towards Waverly, eventually reaching the small country dirt road leading to the farm.  I was driving slow and cautiously, weaving left and right to avoid downed trees and branches and about a mile or so from the farm.  Suddenly I hear a bellowing sound and look up to see a lone cow galloping up the road towards us at top speed, eyes wide with terror and drooling ferociously.  The cow and I stared at each other as she passed our car, and it was just all too weird watching in the rearview mirror as the cow continued her mad dash down the road while we ominously crept onwards to the farm.

We got to the entrance of the place and it was suddenly sunny now, but it looked like hell with trees and damage everywhere.  A tornado had run through the farm, collapsing the stage and filling Ed Volker's piano with gallons and gallons of water.  The show was cancelled, and the theme of the party was instantly changed in everybody's mind to ‘Twas Never Thus’.  We were not going to be denied our good times however, so we headed back to Minneapolis, called up a bunch of friends including Dave, Camile, the Rad’s drummer Frank Bua and their bass player Reggie Scanlan, and had everybody come over to Mitch's house for a consolation tornado party.  We had a birthday cake there as well for Mugsy and Camile who share the same birthday.  It sucked missing the show but we whooped it up all night and had a blast.

The next day was exactly 15 years ago on 6/29/97.  We headed out to the Minnesota Zoo for night-three with our boys and of course it was a great show.  They dried out Ed's keyboard, and he peppered the set list with numerous innuendos and songs pertaining to the tornado including “Hold Back The Flood”.  Two out of three shows ain't bad, and it was a weird but fun weekend.  15 years ago...so much has changed since then and yet it seems just like yesterday.  I really miss the Radiators.  They were like a friendly but hardcore tornado that would spin their way into your town and raise hell for a little while and then move on...but always with a promise to return.  New Orleans and Minneapolis formed the two ends of tornado-alley but San Francisco and New York City took a lot of direct hits as well, along with countless cities in between.

The tornado finally spun itself out after 33 years.  I saw their final shows 12 months ago in New Orleans, and it has been a long strange year without them.  For a third of a century these same 5 incredibly talented, extremely cool, and sincerely nice guys were playing their hearts out and leaving it all on the stage of a funky venue near you.  Thinking back, in all those years since 1984 I have never gone more than a few months at most without seeing them.  Now it is over and I feel like they have broken up with me with the old "It's not you, it's me." line.  The end of the Grateful Dead was sudden and tragic, but final.  With the Radiators however they are all still alive...and not making music together.  I know the road always wins, and their reasons are understandable, but it still doesn't make sense on a larger level and I will always hope that Dave, Camile, Reggie, Ed and Frankie will get back together some day and raise a little more hell.