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.