A picture is worth 2,328 words

I'm at the age where I can reminisce about things most bloggers weren't even alive to experience. I remember the bicentennial celebration in my home town (1976 for those that can't do math.) There were covered wagons and people dressed up like they did on Little House on the Prarie. I remember everything was red white and blue, even my birthday cake that year. It was a flag and fantastically decorated by my patriotic mother. I loved that cake. It was the last cake I really remember loving. I guess it spoiled me because I no longer like cake. Well, unless it is uncooked. Then I like it but I think they call that batter / ecoli.

The picture you see there in the upper right is me (on the left) in the fall of 1989. This came up because some friends of mine and I were talking about the BMI (how fat ya are) and how I think it is hosed. In that picture I am 175 pounds and 72 inches tall. I wasn't only slim, I was dangerously so. Shortly thereafter I ended up in the hospital for dehydration and malnutrition. Ok, maybe the malnutrition was more the McDonald's food and beer and the dehydration was.. well, McDonald's food and beer. Anyway, I was 1.3% fat away from being "overweight" in that picture. No sir, I was not overweight by any means. I was fit and trim and even though my hair was goofy and for some reason I was wearing a cutoff shirt it was the best summer of my life.

Let me tell you, oh my beloved readers, about the mirth that summer has in my memories.

Backstory: After high school I moved to the nearest little city after getting a job in a factory that made and duplicated cassette tapes. (I knew about Melissa Etheridge long before she hit the shelves and I love her music to this day.) I obtained a little apartment near work for a pittance. There was a bedroom/living room and a bathroom. There was no kitchen or any kitchen type facilities. McDonald's was directly in between work and home so I ate almost all of my meals from there. I know, some guy made a movie and he got fat or whatever. This has nothing to do with that. I didn't get fat. I also didn't get healthy but I'm over that part of the story so if you are reading solely for that, start reading from the top again and maybe you'll get your fill on the second helping.

Back to the Backstory. The bedroom was perhaps 10' x 10' and the bathroom was maybe 8
x 8'. We had a tv, a NES, and a cd player. Oh, and a bed. Yes folks, we had a bed. Singular. That will come into play later. There were 2 windows that opened up on to the top of bay windows for the apartment downstairs. You could get out there and stand but there really wasn't enough room to turn around. You could, however, crawl over on to the main roof of the house if you wanted. When school let out my cousin (the one on the right in the picture above) decided it would be fun to move in with me and work in that little city for the summer. His dad said he could do it since I was always the good kid and whatever the stipulations were. Anyway he got the ok and moved in. My cousin has always been a bit more outgoing than I was and soon after school let out and he arrived the good times began.

This was to be the summer of sin and near death experiences and we were but 19 and 17 (almost 18.) We had no idea.

It started off tamely enough, we met some locals and my cousin invited them to the apartment. Eventually we became a very large group of friends, sometimes numbering in the teens, doing whatever it was we were doing at the time. Maybe we got in with the wrong crowd or maybe it was just the right crowd for us. We were adventurous people, always have been. Our tales are varied and I can't ever figure out the timeline quite right but I'll give a few incriminating snippets from those I remember.

We both worked evenings and therefore almost all of our adventures happened after midnight. Our friends were night owls anyway and none of them seemed to suffer the wrath of parental supervision but almost all of them did live at home so our place was the place to be since we were the only ones with a non-parental atmosphere.

One of the first outings I recall was going to the stone quarry late at night. I don't recall how we got there. I think we must have walked. None of us had a car during this summer and in retrospect this is a good thing. When we got to the quarry we stripped down to our skivvies (males and females) and proceeded to "swim" in the silt (or whatever you would call the very very fine mud they had there.) It was mud so smooth you could have put it in a bottle and sold it at a spa. There were several pools of it and after everyone was sufficiently mudded up we trekked down to the river for a cleansing dip and moved on. Could have died on that one. That mud is quite like quicksand. But our skin was never smoother.

After some time we realized we didn't really like walking from one side of town to the other. One of our only hangouts was the Perkins restaurant on the other side of town. It was almost the only thing that was open while we were busy harassing the wildlife and looking for trouble. We decided that since the train passed through on regular intervals, was sufficiently near our apartment, and went relatively near to the perkins in question it was the obvious choice in mode of transportation. The train carried logs mostly and the logs were strapped on with large versions of ratchet straps. We decided the best way to get on was to get a running start along side the train, grab a strap and hold on as tightly as possible. Odd as it may sound, this actually worked. We were able to cut off quite a bit of time using this method. Unfortunately there never seemed to be a train for the return trip. Since we had getting on the train under our belt the next hurdle was to get off the train without dying. We didn't have quite such a scientific method for this one. It was just jump and roll or jump and try to stay upright. Many a bandaids were used as a result of derailing from the train. Regardless we continued to use this method for lack of any better transportation. Too many ways we could have died to even count.

Unsurprisingly, most of these efforts were done under the influence of alcohol or drugs. Sometimes both. We weren't the choosy sort, we took what we could get. At one point a new waitress appeared in the world of perkins and her name badge said, "Trudy." Her name is not being changed to protect the innocent because a) her name wasn't Trudy, they required them to pick a name other than their own for 3rd shift due to weirdos and stuff and b) she wasn't as innocent as one might think a 3rd shift server at a small town perkins would be. I was typically intoxicated enough that the word "Trudy" was too much for my inebriation to allow so she was henceforth named "Tree" which stuck with all of our friends. Tree was to become the first of many.

Tree liked our group and started hanging out with us when she wasn't scheduled to work. One evening we decided to head down to the river for a little swim. We trekked over and being that we wanted relatively dry clothes to walk home in everyone got nekkid and hopped in. The guise of darkness kept all the perky bits hidden except for when someone would do the swing off the rope that was hanging from the tree at the end of the little islet where we had stationed ourselves. Anyway Tree made it clear that night that I would be hers, yes I would be hers. Being of sound mind and body I concurred that I would be hers yes I would be hers. I'm not sure if it went down that night or some other but somewhere in there I was hers for the night. While I'm supremely happy I didn't get rooted into that situation long term, it could have been a very sticky situation.

Another water story, and somewhere I have a picture of this one as well, said cousin and I decided to jump off one of the railroad trestles into the river. With my sharp math skills and some timing we decided there was approximately 27 feet between the trestle and the water. Two weeks later a kid died doing the exact same thing. His feet got hung up in something on the bottom of the river (because you couldn't help but hit bottom) and he never came back up. We never did that again for obvious reasons.

A lot of times, and this means almost nightly, we'd do our nightly adventure and then head back to the apartment. We'd have however many people were still left and we'd be a bit tired. Did I mention we only had one bed? I slept with more people that summer than I have my entire life. And by "slept with" I mean, like fall asleep and they fall asleep too. I recall waking up one time to find 6 people in bed, me being one of them. Luckily, we all knew what was allowed and what wasn't and we didn't have that one person in the crowd that felt grab-ass was a good way to pass the time. I'm not saying there wasn't any of that going on but both parties were expressly or otherwise consentual and we never had a problem with that.

One consentual person was "Colleen." Again, name not changed because she was so far from innocent it would have made a vegas whore blush. Her consent was always given to whomever asked or didn't ask. She knew it and everyone else did as well. If Colleen was known to be there and you didn't see her it meant her and whoever else was missing was out on the roof of the building doing what she did best. If the bed was moving and there were several people already there you could bet Colleen was involved in some way, shape or form. Call us pervs or young and dumb or whatever but there was quite a bit of that going on. Maybe we were all just a bit too comfortable with each other or whatever but it's just the way it was. At some point during the summer her family was moving away so we came up with a little going away song for her:

Bang Bang Colleen
Colleen bangs all day
Who we gonna bang on
When colleen goes away.

I think she liked it.

Another bed story. So we're sleeping away, mid morning or possibly early afternoon, it was too early to tell. There was the cousin, his girlfriend, and me. there might have been more but I don't recall. There was a banging at the door which usually indicated the arrival of the police but this time we weren't to be quite so lucky. The girlfriend was wearing these odd pants that tied up the sides in these metal rings. She had the pants on so that was good. The pants were not tied and that was bad. I don't know if cousin had clothes on or not. Me, thinking it was the cops coming to harass us about the various shortcomings of the previous evening or where and when to put our trash, threw the door open. I don't know if I had clothes on or not. I certainly had on underwear at the least but I doubt much more than that. My eyes grew quizzical at the odd set of people outside my door. From behind me I heard, "Oh, hi grandma, I'll be right there." heh. The cousin still has nightmares about that one. While I was in bed with grandbaby I wasn't in with the consent and didn't partake of the fruit so I found it to be little more than pretty damned funny.

Ahh, reminiscing. If I had to relive one summer for the rest of my life it would be that one. It was filled with Danger, lust, humor, friendship, and all the other things they stick into movies. There were police incidents, other women, missing pillows, interesting ways to obtain alcohol, my only spandex story, vomit stories, drug induced problems, quarks of the human anatomy and the chain I'm wearing around my neck in the picture stories, and yet not a single arrest, std, or serious injury story within our circle of friends. We tempted fate as often as possible and somehow came through unscathed. I can't recount all the stories here but I'll always think of them when I see a picture from that era.

I think if I had it to do over again I wouldn't have worn the cut off shirt. That is all.