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?

Rock Fest '95

It was July of 1995 and I was living in Madison, WI.  My friends and I did not realize that we had just seen our last Grateful Dead shows ever, on July 8^th and 9^th in Chicago.  It was a great weekend at Soldier Field with a lot of our friends traveling in from all over to see the Dead.  One fond memory I have from that weekend was summiting ‘Mount Daddy’ out in the bleachers during the middle of the Dead’s opening set.  ‘Daddy’ was my buddy Mitch Marshall’s extremely large roommate.  He was at least 6 feet tall and easily 350 pounds.  It was still light out and the acid was just starting to kick in, so in a fit of joy I leaped on Daddy’s back and began the long journey upwards.  When I got to the top I pumped my fists, hollered for a bit, and looked triumphantly down on my friends before making the dangerous descent.

 

So we had a blast as usual, but the weekend was tainted with a noticeable decline in Jerry Garcia’s health and performance.  He was overweight and disheveled which was nothing new, but he had started using a teleprompter and was still skipping words and verses.  He seemed confused and not really there.  He was back on black tar heroin and it was sad to see him in that state, the worst I had ever seen in my 100 Dead shows.  Jerry would be dead a month later.  That was an incredibly sad and life-changing event, but not a total surprise.

 

Summer-tour with the Dead was over, but as music junkies we needed our next fix.  So the very next weekend Mitch, Daddy and I looked to the 2^nd annual ‘Rock Fest’ in Cadott, WI for the answer.  On Saturday morning, July 15^th, the three of us piled into Daddy’s tan, wood-paneled station wagon that we had nicknamed ‘The Getter’ (which was short for ‘the grocery-getter’).  We’d had a lot of good times in that silly beat-up car and were looking forward to seeing Bruce Hornsby opening up for The Allman Brothers at Rock Fest.  About 30 minutes into the 3-hour ride to Cadott we decided to stop at McDonalds for lunch.  I was not hungry so I just bought a large Coke with ice, dumped out most of the cola and re-filled it with whiskey.  I was excited for the weekend and ready to party.

 

About an hour later we were half-way there and feeling fine as Mitch and Daddy shared bowls up front and I sipped on my whiskey in the back seat.  We had the music cranked in the Getter and life was good.  Suddenly we heard a thump-thump-thump-thump…what the hell was that?  It sounded like a helicopter.  We looked up through the windows but could not see anything.  The thumping would not stop.  It was loud and persistent, but where was the helicopter?  Was it right above us?!  We turned down the music and strained our necks looking up into the sky but we still could not see the helicopter.

 

We were in the left lane of the freeway and while searching the sky for the goddamn helicopter I happened to look over at the car that we were slowly passing.  The back seat was full of kids and they were all pointing at us and laughing.  What’s their problem?  F*ck you kids I thought, we don’t have time for your nonsense, we’re being chased by a helicopter.  But they kept on laughing their asses off and pointing at us.  I mentioned the kids to the Mitch and Daddy, and after a bit Mitch said that maybe they are not pointing at us…maybe they are pointing at our car?

 

What?  Huh?  Maybe something is wrong with the Getter??  Daddy pulled over to the right side of the road and we all jumped out.  The thumping had stopped and after scanning the sky we still could not see any helicopter.  Bewildered we walked around the car and when we got to the back we saw that the right half of the back chrome bumper had come loose.  It was hanging off the car on a 45 degree angle and resting on the ground.  Ohhhh, duh…not a helicopter, just a loose bumper smacking the freeway.  We all felt pretty stupid, but that feeling of stupidness was nothing compared to the pain that Daddy felt seconds later when he bent over to pick up the side of the bumper that had been dragging on the pavement for the last 5 miles.

 

Daddy screamed in agony and immediately dropped the bumper back to the road.  Holy sh*t, Daddy had burned the hell out of his hands.  We all stared at the angry red marks that were slowly starting to rise up and blister.  Daddy had branded himself.  Unfortunately all of the ice in my whiskey-coke had melted by now.  We were standing there on the side of Interstate I-94 in the middle of nowhere on a Saturday afternoon with a scalding-hot broken bumper, buzzed, and our driver had burnt hands.  What should we do?  I thought that maybe we had passed an exit not too far back, so dodging traffic I ran across the freeway to the other side and stuck out my thumb.

 

Almost immediately a red convertible pulled over with an insanely hot blonde chick riding shotgun, and (unfortunately) a dude driving.  I jumped in back and they gave me a ride to a gas station back at the last exit which turned out to be not that far, maybe a half mile.  They were totally cool and offered to give me a ride back to the Getter after I got whatever I needed.  I thanked them but declined and told them I could just walk back.  So I went in to the station and bought a box of bungee cords to fix the bumper and got a big cup of ice for Daddy’s hands.  I walked back to the car and by then the bumper had cooled off enough to touch.  So Mitch and I reattached the hanging bumper while Daddy soaked his hands in ice.  We stopped at the next exit for some burn lotion, put it all over Daddy’s hands, wrapped them in some rags that we found in the car and then we were back on the road with Daddy still driving.

 

After a bit we got to Rock Fest and met up with a bunch of friends from Minneapolis including Ernie Hagen, Baba ‘Red’ O’Riley, Joe Monsoon, Tommy the Freak, Steve & Renee, Ted Booker, and Polly Birch (the future Mrs. Polly Booker) from Stevens Point, WI, and Nancy Osbourne from Wausau, WI.  I am not sure what band was playing in the afternoon, but we were looking forward to Bruce Hornsby in the early evening and then the Allman Brothers closing out the night.  Before long we all dosed and settled in for a day of music and laughter.  It is a bit hazy but I remember talking with Polly for hours, and being introduced to her beautiful friend Nancy who had gotten a ride there with Polly.  It was two weeks before Nancy’s wedding so this was in effect her bachelorette party…her last hurrah.  So in addition to tripping she was two-fisting beers the entire day and just living it up.

 

After the Allman Brothers played the 4^th song of their show, ‘Blue Sky’, the clouds burst open and began dumping their cargo on us.  It rained hard for the rest of the night.  We were all drenched but it did not dampen our spirits in the least as we all laughed and danced and had a great time being young, dumb, 20-something year-olds.  Rock Fest is a great venue and always a great time.  At the end of the show as we were walking out of the place there were crazy lights and lasers rising up from the stage and bouncing off the clouds and the rain…it was beautiful and scary all at the same time for our acid-soaked heads.  ELO was scheduled to play that weekend and Mitch said that it was the ELO spaceship landing.  Until just a week ago when I talked to Mitch about that night, I did not know that he was joking.  I always thought that it was ELO arriving for a late-night set of music, when in reality they were playing the next night.

 

When we got back to our cars we all looked around and realized that we had to figure out who was going to drive what, and where.  The ‘where’ turned out to be some wooded property only a few miles from the concert that belonged to Renee’s grandparents.  Steve & Renee had left the concert earlier, along with Joe and the Freak, but they had given directions to Mitch.  Ernie had gotten a ride down from Minneapolis with Red, but Red had to go back to the cities so Ernie was our responsibility now and he would get a ride home the next day with Joe.  We finally began our wet, trippy 3-car caravan ride to the property.  So Mitch was in the lead driving Ted’s car, Polly was next driving her car with Nancy, and Daddy brought up the rear driving his car with me in the front seat and Ernie in the back.

 

In addition to his hands being all burned and bandaged, Daddy said he was too high to drive.  But Ernie and I were in even worse shape so Daddy had to do it.  It was one of the scariest rides we have ever taken.  Mitch and Ted in the lead got completely lost in those dark, lonely Wisconsin country roads and drove around in circles for what seemed like forever.  Daddy was not doing well and the Getter was not doing much better.  The headlights were barely on, the suspension was shot, the steering was loose, and the bumper was bouncing up and down on the bungee cords.  Daddy was all over the road from ditch to ditch, but he never fully lost it.  I remember a wide-eyed Ernie in the back seat freaking out as he was bouncing around and sliding back and forth from one side of the car to the other.  I kept wondering where were the cops?  When were we going to get pulled over and beaten mercilessly like we deserved?

 

Finally after close to an hour of driving around aimlessly, Mitch and Ted in the lead pulled over.  Nancy was in Polly’s car behind them and got out mad as hell and yelled:  “Why the f*ck are we following you acidheads?!  Get your sh*t together and quit driving around in circles!!”  Mitch did get his sh*t together and after a bit we finally found the dirt road leading to Renee’s land in the woods.  We found the campfire and there was Steve, Renee, Joe and the Freak waiting for us.

 

Such a relief, but once we finally got there we had nothing to do.  It was still drizzly raining, everything and everyone was soaked, and we were all coming down from the acid.  It was too wet for tents, so after hanging out for a bit by the campfire drinking a few beers we all retired to our cars.  Daddy slept in the front seat of the Getter, with Mitch and Ernie in the back seat and me curled up in about a 2-foot by 2-foot space in the way-back surrounded by boxes and other miscellaneous stuff.  We did not sleep very well and a few hours later at daybreak we crawled out of the Getter, stretched our aching limbs and decided to get the hell out of there.

 

We all drove to a diner in Cadott for breakfast.  I was not very hungry though and when the waitress came for our order I just asked for a bucket of water.  I was incredibly hung over and my tongue felt like a huge sponge.  There did not seem to be a limit on how much water I could drink that morning.  After breakfast we waved goodbye to all of our friends, and Mitch, Daddy and I drove back to Madison in the Getter.  It was a hell of a 24 hours that none of us will ever forget…or completely remember.

The Perfect Comeback

Saying the right thing, or the perfect comeback.  It is almost always an afterthought isn’t it?  How many times have you been in a conversation with somebody, things are said, it’s over…and then 15 minutes later you think of what you should have said.  Like when you meet a famous person and you stammer your way through an awkward conversation…or you meet a hot chick in a bar and she asks you a silly question giving you the perfect opportunity for a witty reply but you totally blow it…or you are at a meeting at work and the boss asks you about a late report and you give some lame excuse.  Then you go over it later in your mind and of course the perfect line pops into your head of what you could have said instead of the stupid stuff that you did say.

It’s frustrating, but what can you do?  You can’t pre-prepare for every situation.  Sometimes I’ll be laying in bed and I will think of something funny to say, the perfect line, the perfect clever thing to interject into a conversation.  But then you have to think of how to get yourself into that situation or conversation and then remember to actually use the line.

Like for example if I am ever engaged in a conversation with Arnold Schwarzenegger and suddenly we are interrupted because somebody needs me in the other room for a second, I will of course look Arnold squarely in the eyes and sternly say:  “I’ll be back.”  Or if I am ever out taking a walk with my 2 year old son Jack and we happen to run into Al Pacino, I will flash him a smile, pat Jack on the head and coolly say:  “Say hello to my little friend.”  Or if I am ever over at the Clinton’s house for dinner but Bill is away on business so it’s just me and Hillary and I accidentally spill my glass of red wine down the front of my white shirt and Hillary tells me to take it off so she can have it cleaned right away and then Bill comes home early to find me shirtless while Hillary is dabbing the rest of the wine off my chest…if that ever happens I will quickly back way from Hillary, point at her and loudly exclaim:  “I did not have sexual relations with that woman!”

It all reminds me of a 1997 episode from Seinfeld entitled ‘The Comeback’.  George Costanza is at a meeting when a co-worker named Reilly sees him stuffing his face with shrimp, so Reilly says:  “Hey George, the ocean called; they’re running out of shrimp.”  George is flustered, and then only later while driving in his car thinks of the comeback:  “Well, the Jerk Store called, and they’re running out of you.”  George thinks it is the perfect comeback and he spends the rest of the episode going to great lengths to try and recreate the situation so he can use it.  When Reilly transfers to Akron, Ohio, George even goes so far as to fly to Akron and brings a plate of shrimp to a meeting with Reilly to try out the ‘Jerk Store’ line.  He gets to use the line but of course it all goes horribly wrong.  Chandler Bing from ‘Friends’ was the perfect comeback artist, George Costanza not so much.

It feels so good though when you do come up with a good line or comeback on the spot without having to pre-plan.  My buddy Mitch Marshall is the best real 'non-TV' person I know at that, but I have had my moments.  One warm sunny spring day back in high school my friend Mark Smith and I were sitting out in the smoking area smoking a bowl and talking about all the stupid stuff that high school kids talk about.  Suddenly Mark nudged me and pointed to a big beautiful monarch butterfly sitting on a huge pile of dog crap.  I said:  “Wow, I never knew butterflies could poop so much.”  Maybe it was the weed, but we both died laughing and cracked up over it for years afterwards.  Or the time my buddy Ted Booker and I were dancing out on the floor at a Radiators concert at Tipitinas Bar in New Orleans and Ted gave me a big joyous hug because we were both so happy to be there.  He’s shorter than I am so when he started to pull back from the hug, instead I held on tight and yelled over the music into his ear:  “Hold me closer tiny dancer!”.  We still laugh over that one, and whenever I hear that Elton John song on the radio I just have to call him.

As I relayed to you in my 2/15/13 blog entry ‘Meeting Heroes’, I did meet Dan Akyroyd once and it was awesome.  I brought up stuff that people normally would not think to talk to him about and we had a great conversation.  That is not how it went though on 10/23/86 when I went to see the ‘Go Ahead’ band at the Cabooze Bar in Minneapolis.  Go Ahead was a band that consisted of Brent Mydland and Bill Kreutzmann from the Grateful Dead, Alex Ligertwood and David Margen from Santana, as well as funky guitarist Jerry Cortez.  They toured extensively in the Fall of 1986 because Jerry Garcia from the Grateful Dead was out of commission indefinitely after slipping into a diabetic coma.  A lot of Grateful Dead shows were cancelled and all of us hungry Dead fans were excited about anything Dead-related.  I couldn’t believe I was going to be seeing 1/3^rd of my favorite band in a bar instead of a huge arena or stadium!  The band played covers and were basically just a bar band, but they were a great bar band.

Seeing as how it was in a bar, I of course had a few drinks and was getting buzzed, and now that I think about it I am pretty sure that I was high on acid as well.  I was standing up in the balcony off to the right of the stage dancing and enjoying the show.  Suddenly during the drum solo I happened to look down and there sitting on the edge of a pool table was Brent!  Freaking Brent Mydland from the Grateful Dead was sitting all by himself right below me!  Nobody was talking to him!  I had to go say hi.  I would never forgive myself if I didn’t.

So I stumbled down the stairs and cautiously approached him, having no idea what I was going to say.  He looked kind of sad and somber sitting by himself and when I got to him I reached out to shake his hand and say hi.  We shook hands and I just stared at him sort of freaking out that I was ‘talking’ to one of my heroes.  Maybe I should get his autograph I thought?  I had no paper so I pulled out a dollar bill and like a dork I handed it to Brent and asked him to sign it.  He sighed and said that he did not have a pen.  Of course not, and neither did I so I retrieved the dollar and put it back in my pocket.  Long uncomfortable silence as we just stared at each other, me with a huge grin on my face, him still looking sad.  I had to say something, anything.  Still to this day I have no idea why I said this but all of a sudden I blurted out:  “I love the songs you sing…the vocals…you sound just like Jerry Garcia!”

What?  What??  Why?!  Why did I say that?!  I don’t even think that!  I love his songs and his vocals, but he doesn’t sound like Jerry, he sounds like Brent.  He just stared at me for a second, quietly said:  “Thanks.” and then turned his attention away from me and back to the stage.  Soooo many cool things I could have done and said that night and I have thought of a million of them since then, but telling the somewhat insecure ‘new guy’ in the Grateful Dead that I liked his vocals because they sound like someone else was not one of them.  So not cool.  And sadly, four years later he would be dead.  If there is a next life I will try for a ‘do-over’ with him then.

The reason all of this comes to mind is that recently we had our annual health screening at work.  If you want you can get screened every year for various bio-markers like your blood pressure, BMI index, blood-work, etc.  You go around to different stations, get screened, and for every health screen that you pass classified as ‘healthy’ the company will dump some money into our insurance plan’s HSA account.

Let me also set this up by explaining that as a guy, we like to brag whenever we have had sex.  I work with my buddy Frank ‘The Tank’ Huffman (star of 9/30/11 blog entry ‘Golfing With Frank’) and whenever one of us gets some from our wives we have to tell the other guy.  So the night before our health screening this year I happened to have had sex, and when I passed Frank in the hall that morning I gave him the ol’ sideways Tony Soprano fist-pump hand-signal.  He smiled, called me a bastard and we moved on.  Sorry, but we’re guys…that’s what we do.

Anyways, shortly afterwards it was time for my screening.  I work with my wife Nadia and we booked our screening at the same time.  So we went and filled out all of our forms and Nadia finished hers first.  She started going through the various screening stations with me a couple minutes behind.

Eventually I got to the blood-draw area where they test your blood for various things like cholesterol and tobacco-use.  The nurse stationed there asked me my name and date-of-birth to verify who I was.  I gave her my name and as she signed off on the sheet she recognized my last name and said:  “Oh, I just did your wife a few minutes ago.”

I immediately replied back:  “Oh really?  I just did her last night.”

It was so…f*cking…PERFECT!  The lady’s jaw dropped, she took a step back, looked at me with eyes wide open and her face frozen for a few seconds.  I wasn’t sure which way this was going to go until finally she burst out laughing and said:  “I cannot believe you just said that!”  We both laughed and then I beamed.  I was so happy.  It made my day/week/month/year.  The perfect comeback.  It is out there ladies and gentlemen…you just have to want it, and live long enough to get to it.

Austria

So picking up where my 1/24/13 blog entry ‘Switzerland’ left off, my girlfriend Lona and I escaped from Zurich, Switzerland early on the morning of August 24^thin 1990. We had only been in Zurich for two days, but that was plenty as we were a little creeped out after walking with the zombies in Needle Park. Using our Eurail passes we boarded a train for Innsbruck, Austria, the next stop in our 5-month journey that had started 4 months earlier in Greece with stops in Italy and then Switzerland. It was about a 4-hour train ride so we settled in to our seats and read through our ‘Let’s Go Europe’ book for ideas on what to do in Austria.

We got to Innsbruck at noon, found a bank and cashed in one of our $100 travelers checks for Austrian Schillings, and then checked into a youth hostel. As with most of the hostels in Europe we had to sleep in separate male/female rooms. We were exhausted from almost no sleep the night before so we decided to nap for a couple hours. We got up still sleepy and disorientated so the only touristy thing we did that day was go to the top of the 167 foot Innsbruck City Tower (Stadtturm). This cool old tower was built between 1442 and 1450 and is in the very center of the city’s historic Old Town. It was a hot day but the medieval tower was nice and cool inside. We were so tired that it was a struggle to climb the 148 steps up to the viewing platform, but the awesome 360 degree view of this beautiful city and the surrounding mountains made it worthwhile. In addition to the great pictures we took from up there, it also gave us a good idea of the city’s layout so it was a great first-stop thing to do.

When we got back down to ground we found a pretty cool café and sat outside trying various sausages, bread, wine and other local cuisine. Then for more wine we were directed to a wine-bar that looked extremely old. We descended down the stone-brick steps into a dark, musky underground room, found a table and tried various wines. Then we went to bed fairly early for a change.

We were well rested the next day and ready for some sights. We toyed with the idea of spending the day skiing. The brother/sister couple who gave us their ‘Let’s Go Europe’ book in Zurich had told us how awesome the skiing was there and not too expensive. Innsbruck…home of the 1976 Winter Olympics…Franz Klammer’s crazy gold-medal run…this was the chance of a lifetime to go skiing in the Austrian Alps! We decided against it though because it was an activity that would take up pretty much the whole day and neither of us were big skiers, plus we did not have winter coats. Just jeans, tee-shirts and light jean-jackets. Instead we took a cable car to the top of a mountain and hiked around in the woods for several hours. Then we came back down to town for sightseeing and another great meal with lots of German beer. We got pretty drunk, but not too drunk to check out of our youth hostel and head to the train station.

We decided to get back to our normal routine of taking overnight trains. We travelled at night in order to save money on hotels and to maximize our limited daylight hours to sightseeing instead of sitting on trains. With that in mind, we left that night on an overnight train for Vienna, Austria. We slept better than usual on that train because as soon as we got on we found an empty private room in a 2^ndclass car, quickly closed the door, turned off the light and nobody disturbed us all night. We got to Vienna early on the morning of August 26^th, and armed with recommendations from our travel book we headed out to see the sights.

We spent a few hours in the huge Kunsthistorisches Museum and only saw maybe 1/1000^th of all the things they had to see there. After awhile it was too much so we left and walked around looking at the cool old buildings and architecture. Then we found Beethoven’s statue that was erected in 1880 in a public square called Beethovenplatz. After a full day of sightseeing we decided to take a nap in Stadtpark, a large city park not far from the Beethoven statue.

After awhile we got up and went to a market to buy some beer. It would be cheaper than a bar. I made beer in college and as a beer-lover was extremely excited to try some of the local brews they had to offer. We bought a bag-full of various bottles and went back to the park. We settled on a park bench with our bag o’ beers and soaked up the sun and marveled at how awesome life is. Sitting in a beautiful park on a warm sunny day in freaking Austria drinking local beers. We thought about our friends back home in Minneapolis and wondered what they were doing at the moment. Then we heard a commotion near a large water fountain a couple hundred feet away across the grass. There were 3 homeless people hanging out laughing about something. We decided to head over and say hi.

They were visibly drunk and eyed us with suspicion as we approached. But after being on the road for over 4 months wearing the same 5 sets of clothes the entire time we looked almost as raggedy as they did and we did not appear to be much of a threat. Then when we pulled beers out of our bag and offered them each one, their faces lit up and we were one of them. We sat in the grass next to the fountain drinking beer and smoking cigarettes for the rest of the afternoon with our new Austrian friends.

They spoke very little broken English and we of course spoke no German so communication was a bit difficult. They were extremely friendly however and tried as hard as they could to talk to us in the little bit of English that they knew. We had a great time trading stories, with them asking us about America and us in turn listening to their stories about how they had become homeless. After awhile we did feel like one of them, as we were in effect homeless too. Back in April we had moved out of our apartment in Minneapolis, packed up all of our belongings and stored them in Lona’s parent’s basement, and bought a one-way ticket to Greece. The only difference between our new friends and us was that we had some money to fall back on.

It was fun hanging out with them, but it was also a little sad. One of them told us how he had a good job, but got laid off, lost his home, one thing led to another and here he was – a homeless man living in the park. They each had similar sad stories. We bonded though and felt close to them. As we all got drunker however, things started getting sloppy. One guy got angry about something and gestured wildly, but we did not know what about. And then the girl accidentally fell back into the fountain and came out dripping wet and crying. We all hugged her and told her it was going to be okay but she just accepted her wet fate as a fitting punishment to her already desperate situation of being a homeless drunk. It was very sad, but it was time for us to go. It was getting dark and we had not eaten any lunch or dinner, so we all hugged, said our goodbyes and gave them the rest of our beer.

We found another café near the train station and had a nice meal, but the mood was a little somber as we thought about our friends in the park with no food or money. Why do some people sleep in mansions and other people have to sleep in parks? It seemed so unfair to a couple of young hippies on the road. After finishing up our food and spending the rest of our Austrian money, we decided our next stop would be Munich, Germany. We headed to the train station for the overnight train to Munich, and ‘Munich, Germany’ will be the subject of a future blog.

Family Traditions

 

With my wife Nadia turning 40 recently I got to thinking about family traditions.  Every family has their own traditions, like what they do around the various holidays and other events during the year.  Christmas time of course is full of traditions.  Growing up as a kid in New York I remember my mom always served fish on Christmas Eve.  Then we got to open just ONE present, and then off to church for the Christmas Eve service.  Then we would go to bed wondering if we had been good enough that year to get all the things we wanted from Santa.  We would be up by 5am to find out, tip-toeing down the stairs where my two sisters and I would find a separate pile of presents for each of us situated around the livingroom.  Santa’s presents were usually the big ones like skateboards or bikes so they were unwrapped.  We would play with the Santa gifts for a couple hours till our parents got up and then we got to open all the rest of the wrapped presents.

 

Christmas cookies were always a huge part of the holidays in our family, and my dad’s mom was the main supplier in our house.  She made a lot of different kinds but my favorites were her fudge, the green marshmallow crispy wreathes, and the chocolate-caramel bars.  Not to be outdone, among many other delicious things I remember my other grandma’s famous fruit salad with the whipped cream every year.  My mom has since taken up the torch, and armed with grandma-recipes she makes and mails me a box of cookies every year.  Bless her heart…Christmas would not be the same without those cookies.

 

In addition to church and all the usual catholic traditions that we grew up with, many of my friends in New York were Jewish so we got to partake in those traditions as well.  I remember going to my friend Cire Wonhsak’s house one December for dinner when I was very young and I asked him where the heck his Christmas tree was?  My mom explained that everybody has different traditions and that at Cire’s house they celebrated Hannukah instead of Christmas.  No Christmas tree?  No Santa?!  I felt really bad for him…but then I didn’t feel so bad when he explained that they celebrate for 12 days and got presents every day.  No way!  That’s like 12 times better than Christmas!  But then I realized that they only got 1 present a day and I got probably around 12 presents on Christmas so it was a wash.  And I remember going to Temple with them a couple of times on Saturdays and thinking that their church was just as insanely boring and senseless as going to our church…so it all evened out in the end.

 

My large, extended family of aunts, uncles and cousins are very family-orientated and we love our family reunions.  One of our favorite things to do at these reunions is play huge games of ‘charades’.  One great charade-memory I have was the time when the subject was ‘movies’ and my cousin Caylon tried to act out ‘Talledega Nights: The Ballad Of Ricky Bobby’.  After about 10 minutes he finally gave up in exasperation as the closest we could come was ‘The Legend Of Sticky Poppy’.  My favorite charade-memory though was the time my Uncle John wrote down the movie ‘Dumbo’, but then for some reason put his name ‘John’ afterwards.  I happened to pick his piece of paper out of the hat to act out, and I thought the name of the movie was ‘Dumbo John’.  I easily got my team to get the 2^nd word ‘John’, but spent about 5 minutes trying get them to give me the 1^st word ‘Dumbo’.  Finally somebody said “Dumbo John” and I let out a huge sigh of relief.  But then the confusion set in…what the hell is ‘Dumbo John’?  We all looked at each other until finally the light bulb went on and Uncle John suddenly realized it was his piece of paper.  I love him like crazy, but I still think of ‘Dumbo John’ every time I see him.

 

We also have a longstanding tradition in our extended family that when anybody turns 40 they get a pie in the face.  It all started when my dad turned 40.  My mom wanted to do something special and she thought it would be a good idea to slam my dad in the face with a cream pie.  She enlisted me do it and I was a little nervous because I was about 16 and he was my dad.  Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to do it, but I was definitely a little bit worried.  It turned out just great though.  He was incredibly confused at first, but ended up laughing it off and a new tradition was born.  In the 30 plus years since then every single 40+ member of the family has been pied by someone.  My dad returned the favor to my mom a couple years later, and that was a blast because it turned into a huge food fight with pie and dinner and whatever else we could get our hands on flying all over the kitchen.

 

After pie-ing my dad, my next victim was my Aunt Sue at a Christmas reunion at my parent’s house.  Sue was super excited because she had just got done pie-ing my Aunt Marguerite right there in the kitchen in front of everyone.  She was laughing and celebrating her expert pie-ing skills until I tapped her on the shoulder and she turned around and ‘Whammo!’.  I got her good, and completely unexpected.  She was so surprised, it was awesome.  My favorite pie-ing though was when I got my Uncle Bob at a ski lodge that we all went to one winter.  He came up the stairs into the kitchen and ‘Pow!’, right in the face.  He just stood there as the pie slowly peeled off his face onto the floor.  Then he carefully took off his round John Lennon-glasses and there were two perfectly round holes with his eyes peeking out from all that cream frosting.  So f*cking funny.

 

Another notable pie-ing was the time my Aunt Sue got my Uncle John.  Unfortunately it was originally a frozen pie that Sue had taken out of the freezer earlier that day, but not early enough.  Her other mistake was not clueing in their three young daughters Annie, Betsy and Katherine as to what was about to happen.  Sue took the pie out of the fridge, John walked into the kitchen and ‘Smash’!  The mostly frozen pie slammed right into John’s nose and fell to the floor with a hard thud.  The defiant pie laid there on the floor with a little indent of where it hit John’s nose while John hopped around in pain.  The girls started crying because they couldn’t figure out why mommy was hurting daddy in such a vicious manner.

 

Now keep in mind it doesn’t have to be on your birthday, just anytime after you turn 40.  In some cases it has been a couple years since it is usually best to wait until a family reunion where there can be a lot of witnesses.  I got it about 5 months after I turned 40 at a family reunion in Portland.  I knew it was coming and I was a little apprehensive about getting a pie in the face, but I was resigned to my fate.  One night at the house that we had rented on the ocean I heard a lot of whispering in the kitchen and I had a feeling it was coming.  Sure enough I walked in and ‘Bamm’!, right in the kisser.  Pie all over my face/hair/clothes.  I had pied a lot of people in my day and I guess vengeance was due.  But as if that wasn’t enough, later that evening my Aunt Marguerite asked me if her piece of pie looked alright.  When I looked down, her pie and the fork with it came up into my face.  Touché.  Well played.

 

As I said the reason all of this comes to mind is that my wife Nadia turned 40 earlier this month.  As my wife she is now part of the family and subject to all of the pie rules and regulations.  She has known about the pie tradition since joining the family 5 years ago and knew her pie was coming, but she always thought it would be at one of MY family reunions.  In her mind she had no reason to be suspicious the weekend of her birthday that we spent at her brother’s lake-house in Wisconsin.  So I called ahead a day earlier and had them get a chocolate cream pie from the grocery store to be waiting for us when we got there.  On the exact date of her birthday, July 5^th, I got up before everyone else at 6am, took the pie out of the fridge and brought it down to the lake.  I stashed the pie on the beach under a huge floatation thing used for tubing.  Then I came back to bed just as Nadia and our two kids Autumn and Jack were waking up.

 

I suggested we go down to the beach so the kids would not wake everyone else in the house up.  While we built sand castles and splashed around I waited for signs of someone else waking up so I could get some help.  I needed someone to distract Nadia while I pulled the pie out from under the float, out of the box, and could then sneak up and get her.  After about an hour I finally heard something from in the house, and on the upper level where the kitchen was I could see Aunt Amy making coffee.  I told Nadia I had to go get something and I ran upstairs to enlist Amy’s help.  She said ‘Sure!’ and we both laughed in anticipation.  We started to head down the stairs when I happened to look out the window at the beach and exclaimed:  “Oh no!  Hunter!!”  Hunter is their big chocolate lab dog.

 

All I could see was his butt sticking out from under the float and his tail wagging furiously.  I ran down the flight of stairs and out the back screen door with Amy close on my heels.  Nadia never even noticed what Hunter was doing and was still making a sand castle.  I ran over to the float and pulled Hunter away hoping to salvage enough of the pie so that I could still get Nadia, but all was lost.  Hunter had eaten the entire chocolate cream pie in the minute or so that it had taken me to go upstairs and get Amy.  His entire face was covered in chocolate and he was barking happily while jumping up and down looking for more.  Hunter valiantly saved Nadia from her pie-ing…this time.  But beware my dear…traditions run strong and hard in my family.  There are no statute of limitations or double jeopardy rules…this is not over…