My nephew Lance was in town here in Minneapolis a few nights ago to attend a scholarship presentation and to visit some relatives. He plays on the University of Wisconsin/Madison football team and we got to talking about Madison and what a great city it is to live in. I lived there for about 5 or 6 years in the mid-1990’s and I loved it. After Lance left I was still reminiscing about Madison and then I got to thinking back to the first time that I ever visited there.
It was the
fall of 1983, my senior year in high school. I only went to Waukesha North High
School for two years, my junior and senior year, but it was one of the most
memorable times of my life and I had a blast. Our powerhouse 11-0 football team
was going to the Division 1 State Championship finals that year against D.C.
Everest. I did not really follow high school football
however. I had played on our football team my freshman year in 9th
grade, but I was not a typical ‘jock’ and did not fit in so I did not play after
that. I went back to playing soccer and have continued to play that all my
life.
To fit in with the football team you had to
be a ‘jock’, but I was more of a ‘freak’. In our school you were labeled either
a jock, a freak, or, I don’t know…a nerd? I was all three really…a hybrid. I
was a jock in that I played soccer and was pretty good at sports. I was a freak
in that I smoked pot & cigarettes and most of my friends were freaks. And I
was a nerd in that I got mostly A’s and graduated with a 3.5 grade-point
average.
I hung out
with and had friends in all three groups, so it was pretty nice…nobody hated me
and I got along with everybody to some degree. This came in handy my junior
year when the freak/jock wars were going on. The freaks hated the jocks and the
jocks hated the freaks and the nerds nervously just stood off to the side.
There were sporadic fights here and there, but it all came to a head one fall
afternoon after school.
There were enough people mad at each other
that by consensus a day was picked for a ‘rumble’ of sorts, with many fights
pre-determined: Mike Murphy (‘Murph’ was a scrappy cornerback on the team and
is now a very close friend of mine) vs. Duane Rodefer (aka ‘Stinky’); Kurt
Larson (went on to play for the Colts and the Packers) vs. Gary Meyer (a huge
250 lb guy with a cheesy goatee); and a few others. The main event was going to
be Jim Prochnow (a super nice guy on the team) vs. Jesse Burrelis (one of the
baddest, toughest, craziest freaks in the land…as Murph recently put it: “There
are only 3 things in this world that scare me: God, my wife, and Jesse
Burrelis.”).
Our school
had an attendance of about 1,500 people, and not many went home that day. There
was a nervous excitement and tension in the air the entire day and it just kept
building and building. Finally school let out and there were literally hundreds
of kids and even a few teachers waiting outside after school that day for the
festivities to begin. There were a few fights here and there but eventually Jim
and Jesse squared off with everyone gathered around for the main event.
Crazy Jesse
started the fight with a roundhouse kick, missed and Jim jumped on top of him.
I had a slim tiny glimmer of hope for Jim, but Jesse quickly turned the tide and
was on top of Jim with a handful of hair and was smashing his face into the
concrete. Horrible, but Jim came out of it with a bloody smile and relieved
that it was over. And it was over. It was like opening a soda and
letting all the carbonation out…tensions eased and people got along better after
that day.
Anyways I normally would not go to a high school football
game because I had no interest. On the many occasions when I told my
parents I was going to a football or a basketball game on a Friday night, I was
really going to a party or whatever. But this was the State Championship game
being played at Camp Randall Stadium in Madison. It was a pretty big deal for
our school and a lot of people were going so I was open to going too. Then I
found out Cindy Burelli was going and she invited me to go with her so that
sealed it.
Remember Cindy? She was
the hot girl that I took to ‘The Who’ concert a year earlier in the fall of 1982. I wanted to go out with her badly and
invited her to the concert when I scored a pair of extremely hard to get
tickets, only to find out that she did not
want to go out with me…she just wanted to use me to get to see The
Who. Well for some reason after that I was
still friends with her, and she invited me and my buddy Gary Paulson to join her
in her parent’s van with a few other people for the one-hour ride from Waukesha
to Madison for the game.
Gary
and I got to her house on the day of the game and we went down to Cindy’s room
to smoke a bowl. Then a couple more people showed up and Cindy pulled out a
1-liter bottle of Southern Comfort and a 2-liter bottle of Coca Cola. We dumped
out half of the cola and poured the entire bottle of Southern Comfort into the
soda bottle. Then we all piled in the van and
her mom drove us to the game. We parked somewhere on a street outside of the
stadium and headed in, where I immediately proceeded to lose everyone I came
with. I happened to be carrying the Comfort/Coke bottle, but where was everyone
else?
I spent most of the game walking around, talking to
people, taking swigs off the soda bottle, but
I never did find my people. I do not remember anything about the game and I
guess we lost, but by the end of the game most
of the bottle was gone and I was hammered. I had no idea where we parked and I
stumbled out of the stadium wondering what to do. I wandered around for awhile looking for the van but then
got extremely tired so I laid down on the hood of a car and went to sleep.
The next thing I know Gary was shaking me
awake. Luckily I had happened to pass out on a car that was on the same block
as the van, just a few cars down the street. They dragged me into the van and
drove me home.
My ever-loving and
saintly but reasonably distrusting mother had a policy in those days that
whenever I went out I had to kiss her goodnight when I got back home. She
always said it was just to make sure that I made it home okay, but we both knew
that it was also so that she could smell my breath to see what I had been up
to. My normal routine was to come home through the garage door, brush my teeth
in the downstairs bathroom, spray my mouth/face/hair with Binaca breath spray,
and then change into a clean tee-shirt that did not wreak of smoke. Then I would go upstairs to my parents bedroom
for the moment of truth. I would slip in quietly so as not to wake my dad, go
over to my mom’s side of the bed, whisper goodnight, and then hold my breath as
I leaned down for the kiss on her cheek and wait for the inevitable “sniff,
sniff”. Then I would get the heck out of there safely down to my room in the
basement.
On
this particular night however I skipped my entire pre-kiss routine. Most
unfortunate. I was too drunk and tired to go through the whole production so I
just stumbled upstairs to my parents room and walked confidently in through
their bedroom door determined to get it over with as soon as possible. I had
made this walk of shame a hundred times and even in the pitch darkness of their
room I knew exactly where to go. So I walked in and headed for where my parents
bed was supposed to be, but before I got
there: ‘SMASH!’ Suddenly I was no longer walking towards the bed but instead I
was laying on top of my naked father and my mom clad only in her skimpy yellow
nightgown.
In my
drunken state had I been too confident in my
determination of where the bed was and miscalculated its whereabouts? No, my mom had re-arranged the furniture in their room
and the bed was not where it was supposed to be. It was in an entirely new spot
and I had arrived there much sooner than
expected. I landed right on top of my sleeping parents, spread-eagled over both
of them, wreaking of Southern Comfort and
smoke.
I was so tired that it actually felt pretty good to be
horizontal instead of vertical, but my startled and quick-to-anger-at-1am father had other ideas. He woke up swinging and
swearing as I suppose he thought he was being attacked. I covered my face to
protect myself from his flailing arms, and from underneath me in a loud
desperate whisper my mom asked me what the hell I was doing. Still hoping to
somehow salvage the situation without getting busted for being wasted, I
scrambled to get off my parents but found it difficult to find a place to put my
hands. There was nothing but parent-flesh
everywhere as I kept putting my hands down hoping to find bed but kept pushing
on body parts.
Eventually I made my way off the bed, but by the time I did
my dad was standing there glaring at me with his hands on his hips. I could
feel his eyes piercing my soul as they blazed at me with fury. I think my mom
was actually scared for me and she sat up and told me to hurry up and go to bed,
so I ran out of there and didn’t look back.
I do not remember if there were any repercussions the next
day. I was probably grounded, but it was
tough for my parents in those days. I was bigger than my dad so he couldn’t
spank me, and if they grounded me I could still sneak out at night or sneak
friends into the basement. I feel bad for all
the sh*t I put them through and if I could go back in time I would be a much
better kid. I suppose their only solace is that now I have two young kids
of my own who I assume will terrorize me some
day.
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