Stupid Things I've Done: The F-Word

[Ed's note: Perhaps due to my recent "eptitude," I have not had any reason to relay any "Stupid Things I've Done" posts in quite a while. Long-time readers consider this a favorite, mostly because it is excellent fodder for blackmail or just for when your customarily humble N.O.C.W.I.T. archictect gets a bit too big for his britches. But I was recounting this one with great fondness for some reason the other day. And there's even a lesson at the end. Most of it is true.]

I grew up on Clay Avenue -- #211 to be exact -- in the 10th Ward of the City of Rochester, New York, in the greatest country in the world: The United States! I lived there from 1980 to 1987, ages 4-11.

It was your typical urban neighborhood, I suppose, fraught with much diversity and many children about my age. Many of them were nice, many of them were not. My best buddy Mike lived in two houses that were about four doors away from each other in both his divorced parents' houses. I gained a cousin through marriage around the corner. There was another kid named Sean Shannon (no relation) who I used to have real fistfights with every two days or so. There was a slightly older kid who lived directly behind my house on the other side of the fence named Eddie Thousand. I don't think that was his real last name, but he was a little bastard, that's for sure.

But across the street lived the Durham's (name changed by one letter to protect the mentally incompetent and in case one of them googles themselves). The Durhams ... oh how shall I describe them? In cinematic terms, they had the unkind demeanor of the O'Doyles from Billy Madison, the number of the Bakers from Cheaper By the Dozen, and the lifestyle of Cousin Eddie from the National Lampoon's Vacation movies. They were, in the strictest sense of the term, "white trash."

The living situation was that two divorced parents moved into one house, bringing all their kids with them. There were probably about 12-14 kids living in the house at any given point, and many of them with different last names. Regardless, my family still referred to all of them as "The Durhams."

I only actually went inside the house in which they lived once: there was a surprisingly large living room with only one couch, trash littered all over the floor, and one TV. I walked in, and there was loud rock music of the day blaring at full volume. All the lights were off, leaving only the slivers of sunlight passing through the drawn curtains to illuminate us. In the middle of the room were about 5 kids playing Space Invaders on a crappy black and white TV. I think people may have been smoking pot, but either way I never went back in.

So anyway I had kind of a cool but tiny back yard. There were lots of places to hide and play (including the garage, where some bastard child from down the street once trapped me, but that's a whole 'nother post). There was a large patch of sand in a corner of the back yard near the house, and we used to use it to create landscapes for Star Wars vehicles and action figures (we called them "Star Wars guys"). One day when I was 7 years old (probably 1983), a one of the Durhams decided to come over to my house and play with the little green, plastic army men. I loved any little action figure type things, so I was all over it. The kid's name was Chris Durham.

Chris Durham was a bad seed. He was about 4-5 years older than I, and was known throughout the neighborhood as bad news. Seriously bad news. He smoked at the age of like 10. He got into fights routinely. I once went to the corner grocery store with him and he shoplifted like 5 things right in front of me. He was not the kind of big brother figure that a young boy like me was looking for. My mother insists that he is currently in jail, though she has absolutely no proof of it. Somehow, she just knows.

Chris brought the action figures over and we began to play. Chris couldn't just be content with being a kid and playing in the sand. He was white trash, remember. So Chris decided to kick up a little dust.

Chris said to me, "Go tell your mom, 'motherfucker'."

I had heard the F-word before, and kind of had an idea in my head that it was probably a bad word, but I didn't really know much else. I had figured, Chris was my friend (Note: Chris was nobody's friend) and he wouldn't steer me the wrong way. Maybe it was a joke that adults would get and my mom would laugh at the funny thing I said.

Without much thought, I opened the rear screen door and yelled into the house, "mother fucker!" I yelled it as most kids would yell "ice cream!" or "Santa!" There was a pause. I'm not sure how long the pause was, but it seemed to hang for at least a few seconds. The next sound I heard was my mother's voice.

"WHAAAAAAAAAAT????????!!!!!!!!"

At this moment I had assumed that I said something wrong. But instead of trying to cover up for my innocent profanity (I didn't have much of a way with words in those days), I reiterated my prior declaration, slightly truncated:

"Fucker!"

The next sound I heard were heavy footsteps thudding on the tile floor. My mother came bounding from another room to the back yard. She promptly grabbed me by my shirt collar and threw me into the landing of the back porch. She stuck her head out of the door and asked Chris, "Did you teach him that word???!!!" Chris was still playing with his army guys, and didn't even look up when he lied, "No." (He said "No" like, "What are you kidding me?") My mom discourteously told Chris to gather his belongings and head on home, before putting me in my room.

I cried and cried and cried. I didn't even know what I had said, but I sat in a chair in my room and bawled for what seemed like two hours. I remember very clearly sitting in the big chair in my living room and watching Mister Rogers. I was still sniffling and coming down from the big cry. My eyes were red and watery, and I felt very sad. I felt that I had done something terrible and that I would be in trouble probably for the rest of my life.

Mister Rogers came on and said that even when your mom and dad are mad at you, it doesn't mean they don't love you anymore. My mom sat down next to me and said, "It's true, Billy. Just because I'm mad at you doesn't mean I don't love you anymore."

"So you don't hate me?" I asked.

"No, I will always love you no matter what," she said.

"Am I still in trouble?" I said.

Mom looked at me thoughtfully for a moment and said, simply, "Fuckin'-A right, you are!"

And we laughed for a good twenty minutes.

Stupid Things I've Done - Steffie

This one goes out to my boy Slim Colt, a true gentleman, and the only person I've ever seen wear 4 sports jerseys at one time. He was in town the other night and we recounted this story for the 900th time. It's a short one, but a good one.

When I think back on college, the images that usually come into my head are the nights in the dorm and in the bars. Other than the occasional dormitory party, I always think of the weeknights, where we'd just be in a lounge watching TV or doing homework or playing Tecmo Super Bowl and those kinds of things. And Thursday nights at the Shire, especially my senior year, were also especially memorable, though I have forgotten the details of nearly every single Thursday night I spent there. When I think of college, these are the things I think of and the things I miss the most.

But some events came out of the mundane events of a regular sober night, sometimes even occuring in the midst of studying.

One such evening, my buddy Mike "Slim Colt" Short and I were in the academic buildings, probably using a computer lab. Well, he was probably using the computer lab, I was probably searching for pictures of nude women or something. But that was way back then when such things interested me and the details are hazy at best.

So Mike and I, burly men that we were, got a bit of a hankerin' for some grub. So we headed down to the Dolphin Den, a small cafe-type area in the basement of Grewen Hall. (Note: Some of you may remember the Dolphin Den as the site of another stupid-ass thing I did with mayonnaise.) Then was usually empty or close to it on most weeknights, because classes were out and no one was in the building except for schoolnerds.

Wednesdays, however, were an exception. For you see, every Wednesday night, the college held classes for people with "special needs." (Don't worry, this is not going to turn into me making fun of people with special needs.) So around the same time every week, these groups of differently-abled teenagers and people in their early twenties would converge upon the Den to get food, or perhaps even a lovely beverage.

This particular day, Mike and I were waiting for some curly fries or some such item, and they were taking a bit longer than normal. As we waited, I made eye contact with one of the special needs girls. I waited a moment longer, and before I knew it, she had sidled up to me. She began to make a bit of small talk: "Those fries look good. Do you usually get them? Is this your first time here?" etc. She was very affable.

Suddenly, the conversation -- clearly going somewhere in this young lady's mind -- took an unexpected turn...

She said the following:

"So I have a question to ask you. (quietly, to herself) I can't believe I'm doing this... (normal volume again) Okay, so my friend Steffie has had a really bad week. So I was wondering, do you wanna go out with her?"

My brain began working overtime. I had no idea how to respond to this most unanticipated query. I had a couple options. I could have taken the easy, rude way out and simply said, "No." But my mama raised me better than that. I didn't want it to look like I was being insensitive to the girl just because she was in a special class.

I briefly (like, nanosecond briefly) bandied about the idea of humoring her, and saying, "Sure I will!" This would have allowed the young lady to save face. But this would have been disatrous. Though I was single at the time, I had my doubts that -- sight unseen -- Steffie would have been a viable counterpart for me, romantically. Okay sure, in theory, maybe Steffie was this young lady's hot nymphomaniac sister. Maybe this was some sort of unlikely oddball romantic comedy in the making. But the odds were against it. And assuming that Steffie was not compatible with my particular situation, all this would have done was get poor Steffie's hopes up.

What if I had been the "funny guy," and played along. It would only have been for Slim's benefit if that was the case. I could have said, struggling to contain my laughter, "Oh yeah, you tell Steffie to be here one week from tonight and I'll take her out for a steak dinner." I had a feeling this girl did not have a nose for my sarcasm and would not have detected the intended irony. Yeah, I'm a real cut up and next thing I know, I come to the Den in a few Wednesdays and have an armada of pissed off special needs folks ready to beat the shit out of me for jilting poor Steffie. I've had dreams about that kind of thing, so thank you, no. (Clearly, she would have been similarly disappointed had I actually shown up anyway, so either way this was a wash.)

There was only one way to solve this very delicate conundrum, and luckily, my subconscious was thinking faster than my conscious. The words came flowing out of me, completely independent of my actual working brain. The perfect two-word phrase escaped my lips so fast and involuntarily, that I was actually surprised after they had been uttered:

"I'm gay."

Steffie's friend suddenly broke eye-contact, nodded her head sympathetically, and wordlessly backed away, terminating any further conversation with me. I looked back at Slim and he was silently laughing. I wasn't sure if he was laughing at me because he found it funny, or if he found me pathetic. But I did know one thing...

Steffie's friend is a goddamn homophobe.

Stupid Things I've Done: The Mayonnaise-on-the-Shirt Trick

I'm starting a new, hopefully recurring part of my blog today called "Stupid Things I've Done." I'm hoping that these things will be so stupid as to make you laugh, not just plain old stupid things, like the time I put a homemade pizza in the oven on a wooden rack, not thinking that wood burns and often catches on fire at high temperatures. That's not funny-stupid, it's dangerous-stupid.

Today's will be a mild example, but I think it's a good idea of what a complete imbeclie I can be. Enjoy!

Summer 1998

I was taking an English class at Le Moyne College, not having realized that I was exactly one class short to get my degree. It was the summer after what was supposed to be my senior year, and I stayed on campus for the summer to paint dorm rooms and take this one class. The class was called "Perspectives in Literature" with Dr. Novak, and to this day I would have to say it's the best class I've ever taken. It truly and sincerely changed my life. The class didn't make me smarter though, and I'll prove it.

One fateful summer day I went to class clad in jeans, a baseball cap and a white t-shirt. I don't remember what the t-shirt said on it, but like I said, it was white. The class was four hours long, and consisted of a woman with some sort of foreign accent (don't remember what kind, but I think it was German), a guy who was training to be a cop, a woman who I think worked at a grocery store, and myself. I'm no genius obviously, but I was like the ringer of this class. The class's participants were less a collection of scholars than people you would see at a defensive driving course for people who crashed into stop signs or something. I felt so bad that Dr. Novak, one of the most insightful professors I ever had, had to deal with this collection straight out of "Summer School."

Mercifully, the class was half over, so I headed down the barren staircase of Le Moyne's Grewen Hall down to the lower level where the Dolphin Den was located. The Den was the place where you could go and get pretty good, cheap food, watch some TV, play some old old video games, and sometimes study in peace. It was usually packed during the school year, but during summer, no one showed up.

Anyway, to speed things up, I ordered some sort of sandwich that had sauce on it. I think it may have been a chicken parmasean sandwich or something like that. It was delicious, I'm sure. But in the course of eating the sandwich, I -- as is my custom -- dripped some of the sauce on my shirt. My heretofore pristine, white shirt. Now, there was a huge red glob in the middle of my shirt, and I had to go back to class with it. There wasn't enough time to run back to my dorm and get a new shirt. Here I was, thinking I was the smart one in the class, and now I had a stupid stain on my shirt. I was gonna look like an idiot!

Quickly, I thought, how can I rectify this? I ran to the restroom and tried rubbing it out with a wet piece of toilet paper, but that didn't work. It just made a wet spot around the stain which further magnified it. How could I cover this up?! I've got it!

I went to a condiment station where one could pick out any of a number of items: napkins, straws, ketchup, mustard, salt, pepper. I saw my salvation; my embarrassment was to be spared by the Hellmann's company. Mayonnaise is white, I thought, and my shirt is white. White on white! It's perfect.

I went back to my table, a packet of mayonnaise and a napkin in hand, ready to undo the cruel past. I proceeded to rip open the packet of mayo, put it on a napkin, and ... wait for it... WIPE IT ON MY SHIRT. This was my brilliant solution. Hindsight being 20/20, I didn't realize two things about mayonnaise that I should have anticipated: 1) Mayo isn't really white when it's taken out of a jar or packet, it's actually closer to yellow. 2) Mayo is made of eggs and vinegar, and therefore not odorless.

Well now I snapped out of my moronic daze and realized what a fuckup I really was. I went back to class with this nasty yellowish blotch covering up a red blotch on my shirt and finished the last two hours of the class. No one said anything about the stain, but they noticed. They noticed...

This was fun.