Monday, July 27, 2009

Memories Of Turning 21 Can Rest Now

Don't we all look forward to turning 21? For me this was supposed to be the milestone that meant I didn't have to sneak into bars anymore and I could buy my own beer at any store not just at the little Korean owned place behind the Social Services building that always bagged it up before ringing it up. Actually I still patronized his store but not as frequently. The night of my birthday I didn't plan an elaborate party. I only wanted to go to a club and dance the night away and drink some beers. My roommates were going out to see Star Wars for the who knows how many times and left before I did. I didn't want to get to the club too early so so I cracked open a beer and was listening to some tunes when Alfred arrived.

(For this story I have changed the names to protect ......... well to protect me.)

Alfred had recently been our other roommate but we had kicked him out because he never paid the rent. He and I always got along pretty well and were close friends. I had always been closer to Alfred than Steve had. Tonight he was touting some Yukon Jack whiskey. "Come on in." I told him. This was a cold wet September night in Utah that already had the hint of frost in the air and it wasn't even 9pm yet. Alfred was soaked to the gills and needed to come inside to dry off and the bottle of Jack looked very inviting too. So we sat around on the couch and drank the whiskey for about an hour telling jokes and stories of old times. I was getting pretty buzzed and still wanted to go to the club so I called a cab. Alfred then showed me a rather large knife in the liner of his jacket. I said, "What you going to do with the sword?" And laughed a bit when he replied, "I'm going to prove to Steve that I'm a man." Steve was one of my roommates. Steve and Misty were at the movie and I really didn't know when they would be back. So I brushed this comment aside as Alfred always carried a knife for protection anyway. I was sure the that was just the whiskey talking. Before my cab arrived Alfred fell asleep and I decided to leave him in the apartment. After all he had been our roommate just a month before. I trusted him. So I left and true to my desires danced the night away. It was close to 3am when the cab was dropping me off at the apartment when my neighbor ran out and said, "Don't go in there." "Why?" I asked. He looked at me very solemnly and said, "Alfred is dead. He and Steve had a fight. There is blood every where inside all the way to the basement." I was shocked and horrified. I had to see this for myself. I went in and nothing can prepare you for what I saw. The blood in some places was still pooled and wet in others it was dry. On the walls, the floors, the cabinets and stairs. All the way to my room the trail of death led. I was so shocked I was no longer buzzing from the alcohol but now stoned from the horror I was seeing and feeling. The police had already been there and gone. My neighbor a card from them. I was supposed to call. You never feel the real horror of death in the movies. This was reality, this was my home and these were my friends. I felt like I was being buried in a gravel pit unable to breathe the clean frosty air. I wanted to die right then rather than live with the building guilt growing like a tumor inside of me. I knew Alfred wanted to confront Steve but I didn't think nothing of it. I couldn't have kicked him out in the cold right? I didn't know then that Misty had been sleeping with both of them. I just thought it was the Yukon Jack talking shit. It was in a way. Courage from a bottle will enable even the most sensitive person to do things they never would do otherwise. No longer would my 21st birthday be remembered as a joyous fun night it was supposed to have been. It is now a grey memory of the past. A memory of two fiends struggling for the love from the same woman. Memory of the night that forever changed my life.

Saturday, July 18, 2009

Life Requires A Bit Of Luck

I personally believe you always need a bit of luck in life to get through it. When I was growing up we didn't even know what seat belts were and the dash of the car was made of metal. Sure glad the accident I was a passenger in wasn't that bad. Luck? The 1959 Plymouth wagon my brother hit wasn't even hardly scratched but his Mustang was totaled. No one was seriously hurt and that can be considered lucky. I haven't won the Lottery yet so I am not that lucky but I have been in front of a couple of guns pointed at me and I have lived to tell those stories. Lucky? When I was younger, can't remember how old but Dad was not in Vietnam, I loaded a .22 caliber rifle with a .22 long rifle bullet. The gun was only designed for .22 shorts. Well the bullet wouldn't come out and I wasn't supposed to have been messing with it anyway, so I quietly placed it back in the closet and never said a word. Sometime later my brother was showing it off to his friend Freddy and he blew the light out from the ceiling. Lucky? I know Freddy was that day but Doug wasn't because Dad gave him a whooping. Twenty something years later as Dad and I were having a beer or two one evening, I told him the truth. He wasn't too pleased but what could he do. I do consider myself to be lucky but luck can be elusive and not always present itself in full sunlight. So ask yourself today, are you feeling lucky?

Monday, July 13, 2009

I Fried An Egg On The Pavement and It Was Me

Wow it was hot last Saturday. The mercury hit 118 degrees in Chandler. As I walked across the parking lot at the South Mountain YMCA the thought occurred to me that I was inside a convection oven and any minute now I would burst into flames or my skin would char. I now know what it feels like to be an egg broken into a skillet. I felt the sizzle Saturday. If salt had been sprinkled on me I would have been cooked, scrambled of course.

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Dad You Have A Face

One of my best moments of fatherhood came when traveling down a winding road on the way to my Dad's place. Donna and I worked separate shifts in order to care for John who was just about three then. I would drop John off at Dad's and Donna would pick him up about an hour or so later. On that day John was next to me on the truck seat in his car seat and as I drove down the winding tree lined road with the sun popping out from amongst the patches between leaves, John suddenly looked up at me and said rather excitedly, "Dad you have a face!" It was so funny because I had had a beard for quite a bit of his short life but had shaved it all off at least two days prior to that day. So for two days he hadn't noticed but riding in the truck it struck him. This still brings a smile to my face today. Back then we were real buddies, cheeseburger buddies in fact. We still are but it is very different now that more than twenty years have past.

Sunday, July 5, 2009

Late Night Coffee

If memory serves me it must have been a Friday night sometime after my 21st birthday. Ray and I had been to a bar shooting pool and drinking beer until we almost were out of money. Which was very typical of the sort of thing we did on weekends. Both of us were almost always broke or close to it but at the end of this night out we had a couple of bucks left. We were walking back to the apartment on State Street in South Salt Lake, it was cold but not too cold. No ice or snow like there usually would be in October. But it was cold enough that a hot cup of coffee from Winchell's Donuts was very appealing. Back then a cup of coffee was only 60 cents and I think we had about two bucks left between us. The Winchell's store we were about to enter was not very big. The customer area was no greater than 15' x 10'. Not exact but probably pretty close. When you walked into the store you would be at the counter in about three steps. We had no sooner taken one of those three steps when a person at the counter turned around and told us, in no uncertain terms, to "get the hell out of here". I knew he was serious because all I saw was the barrel of a snubby pointing at me or at Ray but to me it was pointing in my direction. Definitely not a time to argue when looking down the barrel. I was sure it was a Dirty Harry hand cannon at the time. He of course did not have to ask twice as we turned and bolted for safety into the blackness behind the store. We ran until we could run no more only stopping after our lungs were dieing and our hearts were about to cave in. This would be the first time a gun was pointed at me but not the last. When it happens, if you get the time to ponder it anyway, the gun is about all you will see. Nothing else comes into focus. It appears larger than it really is after all Dirty Harry carried a .44 magnum not a .38 snub nose. But just the same death can come from the barrel of either and I wasn't about to find out that night. When we returned to the apartment about twenty minutes later, Ray looked at me and said something about he thought he went to High School with that guy but wasn't sure. We never called the police. Ray was too paranoid that the guy would send someone to find him if we did. I hope they caught him.