A deep cut on the album of your life

In the late 1980s, I hooked up with a soap opera star who was in Memphis on a promotional tour.

 

Which Bo Brady was it?

IJAG, yours scares me more than the baseball geeks. Tho the combo of Nixon and Bobby Goldsboro tops 'em all.

Another one of mine: I still own more than 200 LPs. Now if I could just get the record player's speaker to work.

 

That's what I did "for fun" as a kid, too, except I transcribed books. It started so innocently, with the little writeups for countries from our World Atlas, but pretty soon I was a stone-cold addict, writing out Dickens longhand in fever dreams.

Also, I started Kindergarten a year early and did grades two and three in one year, which meant I was 11 years old in grade eight, which meant I didn't know what a vagina was when a lot of other guys in my class had penetrated Erica Hall and Tanys Sanders. No wonder I thought they had cooties. Later, I dropped out of high school. But when I finally went back, I was suddenly the same age as everybody else in my class. It's like I hit pause on myself.

 

Once, when I got a C in penmanship, my father made me copy out a chapter of "Wuthering Heights" in longhand.
I hate the Brontes.

 

I play the trombone. Started in middle school and went through my junior year of college. I love watching marching bands and drum corps.

 

When I was in high school, I was in the annual play. And I learned to tap dance.

 

Word to your mother.

There was a stretch in college where I was the Forrest Gump of drug deals.

The year I graduated, I visited a buddy I hadn't seen for a few years. I walk in his apartment and there was enough dope on his kitchen counter to fulfill the Grateful Dead's rider. Enough shit to put us away in the federal pen until middle age. OK, no big deal, we weren't going anywhere.

About an hour into my visit, he goes, "I'm thirsty as a motherfucker, you want to go get a Pepsi?" Sure, I said, anything to get away from Pablo Escobar's Muncie office. Two seconds after we get driving, he says, "First I've got to go drop this off." He had two large sandwich bags full of weed.

We're driving through campus and I'm thinking to myself, "Don't speed, don't speed, don't FUCKING speed!" I think at one point, he ran a red light and my life flashed before my eyes. We get to the house, and sure enough, his connection wasn't home. So we have to wash, rinse, repeat. That wasn't a fun drive.

That same year, a dude named Jake moved in next to me. The apartment building I lived in was ground floor with exterior doors, so he'd come up and talk to me a lot.

He had just got out of prison on a drug charge, but he was a good guy (to me, he broke into someone's else apartment when I was there and threatened the landlord with a gun later on).

One day, I get back from class and Jake is talking me up. He's like, "Dude, can you help a brother out? I just got out of jail and I don't have a ride yet. Can you give me a lift? I've got some business to take care of, it won't take more than 10 minutes."

My BS detector went off immediately, but Jake was a big motherfucker. The last thing I needed was getting gun-raped in the mouth after a home-invasion from my next door neighbor, so I agreed.

After dropping off his laundry (seriously), Jake's business took me to the Muncie projects, which might sound incongruent to the uninitiated, but since Muncie is largely a burned-out shithole, its projects aren't nice.

Jake rolls into his apartment for his business, I hear some shouting, some "motherfucker this, motherfucker that", hoping against hope that I'm not destined to be Jake's getaway car.

Meanwhile I sit in my fly-ass ride -- aka a 1987 White Pontiac Bonneville that had once been my dad's company car -- kickin' it, which is to say, listening to my Black Crowes tape with an Ocean Pacific T-shirt on and a Brewers hat.

Someone should have busted a cap in my ass on general principle.

Jake emerges with a bag of something illegal and I kicked the three-wheel motion back to the apartment. By three-wheel motion, I mean I studiously hit every red light and didn't ask Jake any questions about what was in the bag.

From that point, I always had to "study" when Jake wanted a ride.

 

You and SC need to clean house together.

 

1776 comes on and my feet still do the steps to "The Lees of Old Virginia."

Oh, and I still can sing barbershop in Music Man and three-part harmony to Guys and Dolls and My Fair Lady.

There. I've said it. I've crossed the Rubicon.

 

I've been a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, have particpated in a riot and have ridden in a boxcar.

 

You apparently being older than 100. The Wobblies went away long ago.