Criterion

My best friend Kenny was coming home for the weekend. Kenny had been away in the military and then college so he didn’t get home often. So when he did, it was a big deal for his friends.

Having so much time on your hands and so little to occupy your mind, people in Deadsville tend towards two extremes. Either numb yourself with alcohol, drugs, sports and other non-cognitive pursuits or start looking for increasingly convoluted and creative ways to look at and live in your life. My friends and me leaned towards the latter. So it had come to our attention that during the last few times that Kenny had visited, an odd confluence of events always happened. These events were:

- all of our pencils got sharpened

- the same crappy band played at the local bar

- our friend Stan got laid

None of these events ever happened without the others. If one happened – say, Stan got laid one night – you could accurately predict that Kenny was going to show up and that when we went to the bar, we would find that same crappy band back.

Now some of these were clearly related. Our pencils got sharpened because Kenny would almost always insist on playing Dungeons and Dragons and bring his pencil sharpener. So our pencils would get sharpened. And we almost always ended up playing D&D because the band sucked so we couldn’t go to the bar.

However, we never could figure out how the band’s tour schedule tied into Kenny’s travels. Nor could we figure out why Stan would always get laid that weekend and thus, miss seeing Kenny. Stan didn’t get laid very often. But you could always count on two things. First, it would always be the weekend that Kenny visited. Second, that Stan’s partner would always be fat and ugly. It became such a certainty that we used to joke about it.

Then one day Stan set us straight. A bunch of us were walking down the street when we passed a very attractive woman. While the rest of us spun around to ogle her as she disappeared in the distance, Stan just kept on walking. When one of us commented on how Stan only likes fat and ugly women, he corrected us with, “She doesn’t have to be fat”. At least some things could be explained.

You Gotta Fight For Your Right

My dad was raised with 3 brothers and they all liked to fight. Around Deadsville there were a few other families of boys who also liked to fight. In a city, such families today might turn into street gangs. Or maybe they would have a long history of being boxers or martial artists. But my father’s generation didn’t have such options. It was just knuckles in a parking lot after dark.

Apparently they would have these epic brawls, various families teaming up with each other – one time the McCloud’s might be your ally against the Parini family, and the next time they both might team up against you. They would beat each other bloody, go have beers and do it again a few weeks later. As a kid, I grew up hearing spirited stories of these glorious fights and so did the sons of my father’s rivals. I guess the urge to fight runs in the blood because when they reached a certain age, these boys all felt it was their destiny to carry on their father’s legacy. Through high school and even after, every few months one or more of these guys would try to start a fight with me.

I was tall and fairly broad-shouldered. But I was also skinny, uncoordinated and seemed to lack the gene that makes young men want to pound each other. I had no desire or skill to fight anyone. I was one of those really smart, nerdy, geeky kids whose parents dressed funny. In other words, I was a perfect target.

For the most part, I could out-talk, outmaneuver and otherwise avoid those conflicts. But every once in a while they’d get me in a corner. Fortunately, although I personally did not have the fighting gene, one of my best friends did. Boy, did he.

Brad was like a swarthy, sneering, sarcastic cobra. He looked laid-back, but he was a tightly wound spring ready to fly into action with the slightest provocation. He wasn’t extraordinarily big or muscular. My father called him “wiry”. What he had was quickness and a fearless love of fighting. He never started one…. but he never passed one up either.

When we were 12 years old, Brad and some of his friends would steal away to the bathroom during study halls and lunch not to smoke but to fight. They would stand around and just take turns popping each other in the head. At the end of lunch, they’d all emerge, cheeks red, fists scraped and bleeding, and smiling like hell.

When it came to fighting, in some kind of strange symbiotic way – Brad and I needed each other. He kept me safe and I was the bait that lured in chances to enjoy his favorite hobby.

One night a few weeks after I had graduated from high school, a friend and I were engaging in that ever-popular Deadsville pastime of sitting in a parking lot and watching the cars go by. There were probably beers involved too.

As we sat there, two of these “family rivals” and an out-of-town guy I’d never seen before wandered over and started harassing us – getting up in our faces, giving small pushes and such. I was trying to talk my way out of it but things weren’t looking particularly hopeful. Two of the guys – a rival and the unfamiliar guy – were on me while the other rival had my friend. Just as things were looking quite dire, a familiar voice called out from behind the bullies; “is everything okay here?” The three guys whirled around and found Brad leaning casually on the roof of a car. In the dark, he didn’t look like much. Nonetheless, the two local guys started backing away…

You see, Brad had recently cemented his reputation as Bad-Ass #1. At a gravel pit party a few weeks before, someone started to give Brad crap. He, of course, gave it right back. He kinda had a gift for pissing people off when he wanted to. Before long all 20 of the guys there decided to shut him up. What they didn’t know was that 20 to 1 odds were just the kind he liked. When the first couple guys rushed him, he leapt into their midst like a madman, fists swinging and feet kicking. Ten minutes later they had had enough and called a truce. Brad was sore for a couple days (someone had slammed him into a car bumper) but he was never trifled with again.

The unfamiliar guy who had been harassing me looked like he wanted to take Brad on until one of the other guys said to him “no, you really don’t want to do that”. The two local bullies apologized for any misunderstandings and hurried away.

It’s a hard world out there – especially for a geeky, too tall, uncoordinated teenage boy. In a small town like Deadsville, people have to come together – as friends, communities, and neighbors – in order to survive, thrive and get their needs met. Brad and I had very little in common but he was one of my best friends all through high school. We were there for all of each other’s firsts: dates, being dumped, driver’s licenses, drinking, jobs, deaths, even marriages. We grew up together and always knew that we had each other’s backs. Even in a parking lot. In the dark. In Deadsville.

You Can Too

You Can Too

It was 9 o’clock on a Saturday night in downtown Deadsville. Mert’s Pizza, where I worked, had closed at eight, leaving its loiterers unmoored and looking for someplace to be or something to do. Any place. Any thing. But for the last hour nothing had presented itself and so there we sat – me, Gene, and Stan – on the doorstep of the closed pizza place. In one hour we had gravitated no more than one foot from door.

Downtown Deadsville was never a hopping place. The only time the word “teaming” was used in reference to our town was when a local farmer drove his team of oxen through for a parade. But this night was especially quiet. The bar had closed at its customary time of 8 pm, leaving just the country store as any potential draw of people into town. They had seen scarcely a soul and were already mopping up so as to be out the door not a second after 10 o’clock.

While we sat there, pondering the deep questions of life that arise when you have nothing better to do, a pick-up truck pulled up in front. The turquoise colored pick-up was a highly modified, mobile party machine with a custom wooden truck bed outfitted with rear-facing bucket seats, built in cooler, and one of those cassette stereos that you could hear two towns away. It was piloted by Peter, whose father owned the only gas station/ garage in town. It was good to know Peter because he always had a key to the gas station’s beer cooler for late night beer runs. Or if you got drunk and drove your car off the road, Peter could always get the wrecker and with luck, get you hauled away to the garage before the cops even noticed. And although he was one of the “cool kids”, he was genuinely a nice guy and always friendly to everyone. Even the geeks that hung out in front of Mert’s on a Saturday night.

Apparently Peter was also having a hard time finding fun. So as he pulled up beside us, he held a bottle of Yukon Jack out the window and yelled “You Can! You Can!”. With such a call to action, how could we resist? Before long the four of us were sitting on the sidewalk taking hard hits from the bottle of Jack. We had developed a game where as you drank from the bottle, everyone else chanted, “You can! You can!”. Upon finishing your burning gulp of whiskey, you would exclaim, “You can too!”, passing the bottle to one of the other people in the circle where the process would repeat.

After several rounds of You Can, our powers of observation apparently being enhanced by the process, someone noticed that no traffic had passed by for a very long time. In our lubricated logic, it seemed like a very funny idea to move our little drinking circle from sitting on the sidewalk to standing in the middle of Main Street. So we did. After a few more rounds without traffic interruptions, we decided that sitting seemed like a good idea. So we sat in the middle of the street and continued to drink. Eventually someone remarked that a little campfire would be a nice touch. So we foraged for a few twigs and pieces of paper and made toasty little fire. Still no traffic.

Every ten years or so, the news in Deadsville reports some kids, usually drinking, being hit by a train or car. Once in a while it is a thrill seeking couple having sex on the tracks – the danger making the sex even more exciting. In most cases they are just sitting there, daring the fates to smack them off the face of the earth. It is just boredom that gets people to risk their lives. At some point, any place, any thing, seems better than where you are. Bored. In the dark. In Deadsville.

The woman who closed the country store asked us what kind of idiots we were and told us to get out of the street. We put out the fire and went home.

Snapping

“I want French fries!”, yelled my friend Matt while holding a death-grip on the Dunkin Donuts door. Just another Saturday night in Deadsville. Except we weren’t in Deadsville. We were in the “big city” 30 miles away. When you live in a tiny little rural town, you run out of options for fun quickly. Therefore every once in a while you have to make a trip to the nearest metropolitan area where you can drink the same beer and listen to the same music but in a different place. So here I was, standing outside of Dunkin Donuts hanging onto Matt’s feet so that his body made a suspended bridge between my hands and his grip on the door handle, wondering how I had gotten into this particular situation.

The afternoon had started out well enough. I was working the overnight shift at a group home for adults with developmental disabilities. Earlier, my friends Matt, Gene and Kyle had dropped by asking if I wanted to go have a beer. Since I had to work, I declined but agreed to be the designated driver as long as I could be home in time for work. “No problem”, I was assured. So we had driven the half hour to our usual big city hang-out, a dark and dirty bar called “Cousins” attached to a bowling alley. Our primary attraction to Cousins was that they had live entertainment seven days a week – struggling New England big-hair rock bands – and cheap beer. For less than five bucks you could spend several hours getting a slight buzz, watching and listening to the band, and being too shy to ask the usual bar skanks to dance. A perfect evening for shy, geeky, rock-n-roll wannabes.

This particular night the band had been especially lame and the skanks practically non-existent. So our party had to occupy itself with drinking. Kyle was not usually a big drinker and of course, I was the dry, designated driver that night. That left Gene and Matt to take up the slack. After about 3 hours, I had to get going in order to make it home for work. With a certain amount of prodding, I got the boys moving.

However, once we got into the parking lot, everything turned into a circus. First, neither Matt nor Gene wanted to get into the car. Gene was feeling a little upset with his stomach and Matt decided he had to have French fries that very minute and that the Dunkin Donuts next door was the place to get them. Picture this: We start with everyone in the car. I’m in the driver’s seat with Matt beside me. Gene is behind me and Kyle is beside him while I’m trying to explain to Matt that Dunkin Donuts doesn’t sell fries but that if he stays in the car I’ll take him to the drive-through at McDonalds. Suddenly, Gene bolts from the car and starts pacing the parking lot. I go to get Gene back in and no sooner than he sits back down, Matt gets out and heads across the parking lot to Dunkin Donuts. I know that this DD is used to getting drunks coming in and doesn’t like it one bit. They usually throw them out and call the local police. So the last place I want Matt is in Dunkin Donuts if I want to get on the road in time to make it to work. I go to get Matt to walk back to the car. As he sits down, arguing all the time that DD does have French fries, out goes Gene again. When I go to get him, Matt bolts again. Gene is pacing and puking now, Matt is running for the door and inside the DD I can see them pick up the phone.....

When I started to follow Matt, he began to run. I chased after him and caught him just as his hands latched onto the door handle. I tried a couple futile attempts to rationalize with him when he let out his cry for "Fries!".

There are times when you don’t think. Deep inside you get very quiet and you just act. Holding Matt by the ankles with him dangling in the air, clutching the door handle and screaming for fries, I just gave a little snap like shaking sand off your towel. Except Matt was the towel. His hands popped off the Dunkin Donuts door and before he even hit the pavement I was dragging him by his heels across it. I got to the car, ordered both Gene and Matt into the car and they complied. I have no idea what Kyle was doing the whole time….. probably snickering like I would have been if he had been in my situation. Nonetheless, we were in the car and pulling slowly out of the parking lot when the police passed us on the way in. We waved and made our way back to Deadsville.

Welcome to Deadsville!

This is a series of humorous and instructive anecdotes about growing up in a small town.

The idea should be credited to my friend Mike Davis who proposed it 20+ years ago as a comic strip. I can't draw..... but I can write. So these are stories of spent and misspent youth and adulthood. I hope that you enjoy them.

Kirk

(p.s. Names have been changed to protect the not-so-innocent but if you grew up around my hometown you'll figure the characters out pretty quick).