The Best Of Times

Brian and Boo Boo at Adult Spring Break, Padre Island, TX Early 2000’s.

I wrote about my best friend two posts ago in a post titled, “Pussy”. We used that enduring term to create a reaction from each other – when we needed our closest ally to be riding shotgun. This seemed to always be the case in those youthful moments of never-ending desire. It is hard to find an instance where the bond was created, but there was certainly a string of events that built the foundation of our friendship. Time was the key to the petri dish that our friendship grew in – those first couple years in high school we spent enormous amounts of time just hanging out watching “Beavis and Butt-Head” on MTV and trying to figure out places that we could go find females that weren’t supervised by adults. Brian had the least supervision of my friends and that also created a space for us to be bad and we always liked to test the boundaries of our badness. We both loved football and were leaders on our team and we didn’t fuck that up – we were at every workout, every practice and played most every play in the games. The love for the game was something we shared. We also shared several other friends and were known to enjoy “The Life of Riley” on the river fishing. There was always a twelve pack of cheep beer involved but for the most part we were peacefully participating in nature. Catching small mouth bass in the Yakima River in Southeastern Washington was the basis for exceptional evenings as the sun dove down we would wade into the middle of the river and find some still water behind a large rock knowing that a fish was chilling in the backwater and swim our grub by his face causing him to feast and the fight was on.

In our endless search to expand our consciousness, we would sometimes ingest entire bottles of cough syrup which brought us to another dimension. Our whole group of renegades would do this and then go explore a place referred to as the Delta – a huge wetlands area that didn’t even have roads for the cops to come find us on. Within the Delta there were different ecosystems – there were huge fields of grasslands where the grass was never mowed so it came up to your chest – there were forests so dense that they were hard to navigate, which made them spooky on a dark nights. When we were freshman the Delta seemed dark and foreboding, but the more we ventured into it the more we took ownership of it. One of these starlit evenings there was a group of us boys that drank the magic potion and were running around the Delta as if we were participating in a “Lord of the Flies” sequel. We were sprinting through the grassy fields yelling at the top of our lungs animal sounds – the energy and cacophony of it all was magical.

Brian started dating a girl his senior year of high school that he stayed with for the next six years and that made her a large part of my life as well. She was sweet and kind, but liked to be bad with us just enough where she wasn’t appalled by our deviant behavior. By this time, Brian and I had built a friendship that didn’t require work, it was natural to spend almost all of our free time together. I had moved to Florida with my mom, but I traveled back to Washington for the summer, by that time the catalyst for my moving to Florida had been overcome and my mom was back with my dad. We spent that summer working, floating and fishing. We drank a lot of cheap beer, probably ate some mushrooms from time to time and sat around a fire most nights in the dessert by my house. There was a little stream that flowed through the dessert that created a small forest on both sides and gave us enough cover to hide a fire from the cops – this place was called “Beer Falls”. Brian stayed at my house a lot that summer as we were close to his girl as well. I left for football season our senior year and went back to Florida – I had felt some magic there with the team and believed that we were going to have an exceptional season. I knew that our Washington team was average and the universe revolved around me – I don’t think that my empathy was at adult levels at that age.

When I came back from Florida for the second half of my senior year, after having a disastrous senior year of football all do to my own bad decisions, Brian and our crew were dealing with some of the same bullshit that I had created in Florida. Drugs were becoming a problem – mainly crank which some of our friends had become addicted to and were even using needles to inject. Brian had had a tremendous football season and was going to attend the University of Montana the next year on a full ride scholarship. I still had enough faith in myself to think that I could play at the next level and I was offered a place on the team, no scholarship, at the University of Idaho. That spring was full of good times. Our group was thriving and the upperclassman that had tortured me before I left to Florida were spread out all over Washington and Oregon going to college and not thinking about dragging me threw the mud for fun. Brian and I created a beautiful evening for our Senior Prom – we bought tons of Chinese food and bottles of Boones Farm wine and took our dates down to the river where we enjoyed a picnic on the shores of the Columbia River. Brian wasn’t a dancer so he didn’t get tickets to the Prom, but I took a good friend that chose me for my willingness to dance, so after our sunset picnic, we headed off to the dance while he went to the hotel room that my mom had rented for us and got the party ready.

Once college got started Brian and I were not that far apart at first – Moscow, Idaho to Missoula, Montana was four hours drive and Brian’s girl would make her way to my college and we would drive the rest of the way together to see him. Maintaining the connection was something that we always did – we stayed in touch. This was before cell phones – we would literally have to call college dorms and leave messages, but there was something about time together that meant a lot to both of us. The first time that we arrived in Missoula we had to get a hotel as Brian was staying in the dorms – it wasn’t the fanciest of places being that I only had fifty bucks to my name. We went to college parties with kegs and ate fast food to keep the costs low. I got an asthma attack during the weekend, but did not want to spend the $15 to buy an inhaler at the store, so I tried my hand at thievery, which I had never done, and it showed as I was caught as I walked out of the store. An undercover grocery cop grabbed my arm as I left the store and asked to me to hand over the merchandise, which I did, then I pulled my arm away and ran like hell. Running around the corner of the store I had chosen the side that the security man parked his car and now I was outgunned running from a man in a vehicle all while having tight lungs from my Asthma attack. He cornered me behind a health club and got out of his car to continue the chase, I went for the only door available and it entered into an aerobics class, he had almost caught me as I slid through the door. I jumped over the ladies exercising and ran through the club and out the front door. The door opened up to a huge soccer complex with several soccer fields – I ran out to the middle of the fields to catch my breath. There were now some bagging clerks as well as the security guard coming towards me on the fields and there were police sirens coming towards us. I let them get within six feet and took off again, this time aiming for neighborhood on the other side of the fields where I could jump fences and increase my odds of escape. I could see Brian circling around the neighborhoods, but I could not get close enough to wave him down. I bobbed and weaved through the neighborhood until I found a busy street and a stoplight, I ducked next to a house until the stoplight stopped the cars and looked for a younger driver that might help me out. I ran to a random car with a young man driving, got in the car, took off my coat and hat and looked over at the boy. He was terrified. He was also handicap with only one full arm and the other only half with a nub that could still help him with the steering wheel. I was a college football player with long hair and goatee that looked somewhat like a Hells Angel. He drove me to my hotel and didn’t call the cops on me. Brian was there laughing his ass off when I arrived – he had to take me to another store for the inhaler. This time I just took a couple hits while at the store and put it back on the shelf – problem averted.

When I transferred to Southern Oregon the drive became 11 hours from college to college, so it was more likely to meet in the middle at our home town while visiting our parents. Brian did make it south on Spring Break one year though and we headed into Nevada to do one of our favorite things, gamble. It is hard to gamble when you are very poor, but somehow we would squirrel away a couple hundred dollars that we could then go burn in casinos. We were professional drinkers before the age of 21, so the free drinks were a draw and we always thought what we lost gambling would be made up in Jack Daniels. Brian didn’t only make it the 11 hour drive to Ashland, Oregon, but we took his little Chevy Chevette hatchback all the way to Lake Tahoe from there as we had free lodging at my cousin’s house. We stayed up for days gambling, somehow not loosing everything we had, but certainly not getting ahead either. We were athletes, but booze and gambling created alter egos that smoked like the Marlboro Man and drank like Nicolas Cage in “Leaving Las Vegas”. We played hours of black jack, roulette, craps and I played poker. We should have been skiing, but we loved gambling too much. The drive home was like playing a video game in a snow tunnel. We drove his little hatchback into the teeth of a blizzard with little fear. He had studded tires for his safety in Missoula and they kept us on the road with at least a foot of snow on the roadway. There were lots of cars abandoned in the ditch along the road and as we were getting to the end of a particularly hairy mountain pass we ran into a couple stranded with a huge Golden Retriever and we had no choice but to load them in the tiny backseat of the Chevette. The wet dog stuck his head up through the middle of seat as Brian gave it a headlock and a hug – he was a lover.

I’m not sure why we really enjoyed each other’s company, but brought out the darkest parts of both of our personalities. Brian was a better man when I wasn’t around, but we were determined to conquer the dark side. If we had found religion instead of booze, gambling and football, maybe we would have used all our energy for good – we had excesses of it. As we evolved, or in our case, devolved into adulthood we chose each other, alcohol, drugs, clubs, casinos, bars, boats and any form of debauchery that we could latch onto. While living together in Houston we invited our high school friends to make a journey to South Padre Island during college spring break. We had never been able to afford such trips while actually in college, but now we had jobs and enough money to get nice hotel rooms on the beach. The men showed up in Houston with a hankering for a party and it was my job to make sure they had plenty of intoxicants. We snorted all the cocaine the first night of coarse – that is how cocaine works, you use it until it is gone then you load a bowl and go to sleep. We then worked our way into a stash of twenty five ecstasy pills which were supposed to get us through the rest of the week, but we had an insatiable appetite for these little bundles of joy and they were soon gone leaving us with hydrocodone, weed and good ole alcohol. The boys rented a six person golf cart with a paint job like a black and white cow and had to get it towed off the beach as they berried it up to the axels. All the effort and I don’t think any of us got laid, the expectations were too grandiose.

We loved to be in the world – on Bourbon Street in New Orleans or 6th Street in Austin. We had local bars in Seabrook, Texas that new our drink order before we opened our mouths. Brian was by my side for mellow adventures as well. We would be the first on a friends boat or to agree to a camping trip to the hill country. The Guadalupe River had all kinds of cool camping spots tucked along its shores near New Braunfels, Texas and Brian had come across a particularly interesting love interest as I had taken my first long term girl friend since he had known me. We all decided to camp along the shore of the Guadalupe one weekend. His girl was affectionately known as “Crazy Girl” by my future wife and I. She had been married and her husband had died while having sex with her, or at least that was her story, and I certainly believed it because she was cray-cray! She was also stunning, so she checked in on the hot/crazy scale as a ten and ten. She dug Brian, but she was likely to bust out into tears and laughter at any moment and no situation was stable – she could change her mind, bolt out the door or light the place on fire without warning. I like observing crazy, but I do not like being the negotiator and Brian wasn’t that thrilled with that part either, but he had some really good times with her. We floated the river one day and camped along the shores with a fire and friendly pill or two staying in her camper. Brian had taken to my girl like I had to his high school and college love. He treated her with the same love that he had for me and I wish that he was around to see us on our 24th year of marriage, but during this weekend I tried to get him and Crazy to engage in group sex. Can you believe it, Crazy didn’t go for it (my future wife certainly wouldn’t have either), but me an ole BG were in. At least we could fantasize. We had shared women on drunken nights of our youth, more than once, but those stories are a little obscene.