Chapter 1
1
“We have spent this entire summer living on chipped ham and No-Doz.”
This is the quote of the year. I only wish that I had been the one clever enough to come up with it, but no, the credit for this belongs to Mike Nelson. A quote that’s memorable, concise, and accurate all at once. You live your life hoping for one line as good as this.
He first utters this oft repeated gem one afternoon in their kitchen, to an audience of Lisa, Doug, and me, near the tail end of this epic season. Even now, people still have this image of me riding everywhere on bicycle, mostly the result of a couple crazy months from this sleepless summer. And whatever the mode, it sure seems like everyone is moving from points A to B to C at the same constant manic clip, although admittedly there’s not a whole lot of free time to contemplate what anybody else is doing.
Damon and Paul have sequestered themselves up in Mansfield ever since school let out, this much I know, and Alan has been pulling an assload of overtime at the airport. Separated into such distinct camps, our paths have scarcely crossed, and we’re relying on borderline urban legends to inform us what might be happening elsewhere. Breathless updates when Alan and I briefly catch sight of one another, say, for five minutes in the kitchen, or weird developments such as Mandy and Erik, who are crazily enough now dating, dropping by out of the blue - the first and last occasion he ever sets foot in our pad, and possibly Columbus as a whole for that matter - to retrieve some sleeping bag she left here months earlier. Alan almost on a recon mission of sorts one other occasion when he happens to be up north and hangs out with Damon for a few hours. I haven’t seen the dude in eons, and he asks what the hell I’ve been up to.
“Jason’s been partying his ass off,” is Alan’s reply.
That might be partly true, but it’s only a matter of necessity. Whoever could have imagined that hanging out at keg parties could become a matter of survival? Somehow I landed in this one precise spot of the hamster wheel, and have been stuck here ever since. I have no car, and my schedule is absolute mayhem. Beginning in early May, they will pencil me in for 119 out of 120 days opening the dining room at the restaurant – though I manage to switch out on three of those occasions - and to top it off continue putting in either four or five nights a week, part time, at the Kroger further up on Bethel. When the car broke down, soon so did my energy for pedaling all the way back to campus at such a late hour. Particularly as Doug and his maniacal roommates are throwing down almost every evening, just down the street from our store, and are always willing to let me crash there.
It’s about a 16 mile roundtrip from home to Kroger and back again, but by crashing at Doug’s, I shave a good five off of that figure. So this soon turns into waking up there every morning, bicycling to campus, then returning to this neck of the woods to close down the meat department and party with these lunatics again. The only break in the pattern occurs on the nights I’m scheduled off and can actually chill at my own damn house, or maybe check out campus for once with Alan.
He’s up at the apartment on Bethel quite a bit himself, as the summer progresses. This fact is directly related with how, improbably enough, I don’t sleep with Lisa for a few years following just that one night in the spring. If we were ever alone again, it probably would have happened. But this never transpires, and I still don’t feel bold enough to paw around at her in front of, say, Mike or Doug, or her brother Tommy, who’s around now all the time as well. One night we’re actually sitting side by side on the couch (AKA “Doug’s bedroom”) and she pats me on the thigh, in this living room full of people watching some TV show, and hints around saying, ”remember how we used to watch movies in my room together?” But I don’t feel like making a spectacle of responding to that, either, with all these people around.
Well, the day after that heinous misdeed, I did confess to Doug, figuring she would tell everyone anyway and I would head this off at the pass by claiming I was insanely drunk. Which wasn’t true, and anyway Doug wasn’t buying it.
“Eh, you don’t do anything drunk you wouldn’t do sober,” he replies.
I was, and am, even as the summer ends, still figuring out the social code here in the big city. It never occurred to me that she wouldn’t tell a soul. Meanwhile, I’m not just telling Doug, I’m shouting about it to Damon and Paul in Maxwell’s, during one of the last nights we ever hang out there and before they basically disappeared from the face of the earth for the next three months. Those two will spend pretty much every night this summer drinking until the wee hours at Erik’s apartment, in Galion, whether or not Damon and Erik and Frank had played a show that night or not.
I will later realize that they probably didn’t even hear me. Paul chuckles and says, “that’s cool,” while Damon just nods. Granted, it is kind of hard to remember stories about someone you’ve never met, even if my words are understood over this club’s bass heavy roar. Well, Paul has met Lisa, although she isn’t exactly the type of person he would pay much attention to. As for me, yeah, it’s a boast in some respects, although more relief than anything - relief at finally getting off the schneid here in C-bus. Lisa isn’t that fat, after all, and she has a pretty face. She’s far better in both respects than, for example, the other Lisa, the one who donated those jet stopping pink panties to our kitchen wall.
Still, I didn’t move to the OSU campus to get hung up on some half-assed one night stand like this. That probably wouldn’t happen regardless who it was. But more than anything, I must admit, damaging though it might be to any man’s ego, the main reason Lisa and I don’t hook up again is that she gets one look at Alan, and instantly latches with a stranglehold on his nuts.
Again, he has in fact been at this apartment a couple of occasions prior, although these were massive blowouts and her mind was apparently diverted elsewhere. The first night she actually notices him, we’ve chipped in for the latest Tyson-Holyfield fight and he too has driven over to Doug’s to watch it, after getting off at the airport. Lisa and I are in the kitchen, and she points through the wall to where Alan’s sitting on the couch, drinking a beer.
“Who’s that?” she whispers.
“That’s one of my roommates,” I tell her.
She nods as if simply filing away this factoid, unimpressed. But this pairing will soon develop into one featuring more action and sparring than the actual boxing match. It being the infamous bout where Iron Mike launches into cannibal mode - prompting Doug’s own most famous quote of the summer, “I could respect the first bite, but not the second” - this one will wind up a resounding dud for which we should have pocketed our money instead. It does lead to what was surely inevitable anyway, though, as Alan and Lisa soon become major fuckbuddies.
This wouldn’t happen the first night, but I believe it did the second. The three of us somehow sit on the front stoop drinking for hours, watching the traffic on Bethel as we wait on Doug and Mike to return from their softball game. Instead we eventually learn they’ve stopped at Sluggo’s - a bowling alley bar on Sawmill - for one drink that turns into a dozen. The three of us finally say screw them and drift up to DiMarco’s anyway. Return with some others to a house full of people for cards and, yes, first those two are rolling around on the floor, and Alan’s winking at me, then they’re disappearing upstairs together.
So he’s in the regular rotation at this apartment as well. Most nights, there are eight if not nine of us crashing here - him and Lisa in one upstairs bedroom, Doug on a couch, Mike and Amber on another couch, me on the floor, Tommy and Junior in the basement. The only variable seems to be whether Maria is fucking this Dane character, who was recently hired to join Doug and me in the meat department, on that particular evening, or if they’d gotten into an argument and he left.
Even when shit blows up, the basic configuration doesn’t change much. Things are so frantic that some opportunities fly by so fast you wonder how you missed them, and what the hell you might have been thinking - but that’s just it, we can’t even stop to think. One night two girls we’ve never met before, Christina and Kate, whom Dane just met somewhere and invited to the party, are standing in that kitchen telling me and Alan that they have this ongoing debate about who gives the better blowjob. They’re looking for volunteers to judge their efforts. If I had to speculate, these two do seem to be serious, and we shrug, say sure, yet continue to stand there talking and never do take them up on it. Granted, Lisa is surely lurking just around the corner, negating Alan’s chances. As for me, I don’t pounce, but the shorter, plainer looking of the girls, Christina, does begin dating Junior, briefly becoming the tenth person crashing here on a regular basis. Until one night a bunch of us are out at Yucatan Liquor Stand and somehow she and I start groping each other, begin making out on the dance floor.
“You’re a lot more my type!” I remember her shouting to me, though we are both quite hammered. Next thing I know Lisa’s shoving me halfway across the dance floor, and then Junior’s poofy Elvis hair, his ridiculous moustache and ever present Hawaiian shirt are looming above me, grimacing in distaste at this sorry scene. I apologize profusely for this stunt. He even eventually moves out with this chick, months later, to the nearby town of Marysville.
Nobody really holds it against me, though, not even Junior. And now that Lisa’s hooking up with Alan, she especially treats me like an amusing yet harmless little kid, never mind our history, not really fit for prime time in her elevated land of adults. I don’t mind, in fact I’m used to it. But if the first six months down here in Columbus had been about establishing ourselves, then the next six months, I’ve decided, will be about refining the operation.
In pursuit of this elusive goal, the party rolls on without pause, though providing an ongoing education. One Saturday night we’re closing down the meat shop and Doug asks me if I feel like going to church. I think he’s joking and laugh off the suggestions - yet this is just my ignorance, as I have no idea the extent to which Catholics get down. It turns out there’s this huge festival at St. Timothy’s, tucked away on some sleepy street in Upper Arlington, one which basically combines your average street fair with a Las Vegas casino. Booths selling beer and brats and burgers, stands showcasing various games of skill, games of chance, not to mention the huge indoor building with two dozen card tables, including blackjack played for money.
All proceeds benefit the church’s coffers, a cause increased greatly by our arrival on its grounds. Somehow four guys and nearly twice as many females, among them a pair of newbies Doug roped in from work, cram into just two vehicles for the relatively quick jaunt over here. As Doug and Roy lose their shirts at cards inside the church, Miles and I tote around bottomless plastic cups of draft outdoors, occasionally intercepting the roving pack of girls we came with, as they throw plastic rings around Coke bottles or bulldoze quarters around the grass midway. But we’re mostly checking out the others, pure strangers in the crowd. Lisa, in Alan’s absence, is suspiciously plying me with beverage, though she’s never a consideration. Instead the real entertainment is provided by Miles, this musclebound, thirty-six year old black dude from our store, a known pussy hound who makes no effort to conceal the eyes popping out of his head as he whistles and rotates his neck 180 degrees to ogle points of interest.
Of late the tropical winds blowing through our fair city, particularly after the sun has gone down, bring with them an optimism telling me that anything can happen on any given night. Even so, I’ll look back at ones like this and they will seem a dream not even 24 hours later, ones which somehow surpass our campus shenanigans on the pure weirdness scale. Can this much off the wall crap happen in one night? Yes. And so it is that after a quick pit stop at some sports bar for another handful of drinks apiece, it’s back to their apartment, where Carrie pukes up a considerable volume of the Purple Hooters she’s just consumed and lies on Mike’s couch, laughing her head off, while Lisa bitches a storm about cleaning the mess. Then the front door breezes open and some well-dressed, decent looking but quite trashed brunette none of us have ever seen before drifts into the fray. She has mud all over her ass and says she was trying to find some guy she had sex with last week, but just fell out of a tree while attempting to locate his apartment. She heard us partying and thought this might be the place. Sits and tells us this same tale approximately fourteen times, then she pukes in the same downstairs bathroom Lisa just cleaned. Now I can’t stop laughing, too, though the queen of this estate remains less than entertained.
Lisa’s occasional haughty fits aside, you begin to suspect nobody gives a fuck anymore, including law enforcement. We walk up and down the sidewalks of Bethel with cans and bottles of beer all the time. One night I’m idly hanging out by the ATM as Doug withdraws some cash, watching traffic and holding both our brews en route to DiMarco’s, when a police car cruises past and keeps right on moving without incident.
As if things aren’t action packed enough, another relatively new hire to our meat department, this quiet, bespectacled black dude named Clif, lives just up the road from our store as well, on Dierker. In time his pad becomes another regular piece of the arsenal, if nothing else for variety’s sake. His inclusion in the canon is anything but assured in the early going, however, as we’re not even sure we’ll ever make it over there. The night of his first party, Doug, Dane and I are closing down the shop, and I ask these two if they plan on attending.
“Come on, man,” Dane mumbles, with the shaggy blonde hair and stoned aura of a surfer, though as far as I know an Ohio native, “this is Clif we’re talkin about. What kind of party could this possibly be?”
Doug, who has been on the fence, smirks and tells me, “he’s got a point.”
But I manage to talk the two of them into it anyhow, another eye opener of a night. Though merely a casual social drinker himself, Clif becomes the first person I’ve ever hung out with who actually keeps a comprehensive liquor cabinet stocked and loaded on premises at all times. Far more importantly, though, this fairly average, two story apartment is crammed to the rafters full of people, many of them young, pretty, impressionable females. As Dane and Doug had alluded, Clif doesn’t strike many as especially debonair or smooth, and yet this doesn’t matter. It’s all in whom you know, volume is everything. As it turns out Clif has worked for pretty much every restaurant chain one could name, and half of the grocery stores as well.
It doesn’t seem fair, but a related observation was one of my first lessons upon moving here to the big city months ago. For whatever reason, going to school with people just doesn’t create the same bonds as a few days spent working in the trenches beside them. By virtue of attending classes at OSU five days a week, Damon is surrounded by collegiate tail, but can’t seem to gain much traction, at least not in his half year spent there so far. In contrast, while clearly not hitting it out of the park by any means myself, I feel like only by working daytime shifts at some middling restaurant on campus, with a much, much smaller sample size, it’s been far easier to put some things together socially. Sure, everything is inverted at the moment in that my nights all summer have been spent almost exclusively in Upper Arlington instead of on campus, yet nonetheless, the example of Clif’s ability to string together some insanely happening parties despite his apparent dorkiness is another piece of the puzzle, snapping into place.
Though attempting to glean as much as possible from these influences, I still can’t quite seem to entirely pull off behaving like most quote unquote average people. Granted, much of this might be attributable to my attitude, as hanging out with others does often seem like a hilarious art project. Yet, I am persistent, and I’m figuring things out. All you really need to succeed in life is time, energy, and maybe a good memory for what works and what doesn’t. And this next half year will be all about elevating our game to a higher level.
Things are already beginning to somewhat gel for me, and really for all of us. But even when you are figuring some stuff out, maybe, and life appears to be on the upswing, you still have to focus. One of the girls from the restaurant, Marlene, is having a pool party at the poorly named Governours Square apartment complex and I attend, bringing Alan with me as a wingman. There is no shortage of nice-looking ladies, most of whom I know, running around in swimsuits, and it would seem we’ve arrived in some sense by even being invited to such an event. But between the beer in the cooler and the food coming off the grill, I feel like we spend half our time staring at the admittedly amazing ass of a banquet manager, Val, in her bikini bottoms, and the other half in the clubhouse watching sporting events with the dudes. I lament allowing this to become a much more brotastic adventure than envisioned, mingling far less than I wanted with the females, regretting it before even leaving this place. This simply cannot happen in the future.
You have to focus in both senses, micro and macro. You have to keep your head in the game in the moment, but also remain locked in to your long range objectives. So the end of the summer’s theme becomes getting my house in order. I’ve sent my cousin a check for this car she was trying to sell, now I just need to find a way to get up to Mansfield and retrieve it. Once I have some wheels, I’ve decided, it will be high time to quit Kroger and focus on this campus scene proper, by working days and nights both at the restaurant. This madness simply cannot continue - on both a physical and a social level, all these nights spent away from campus are killing me.
Before either of these developments takes place, though, life does soon have us on our heels with the sort of rapid fire jabs that Tyson couldn’t seem to manage back in July. At summer’s end, Doug receives a call one night about a high paying construction job for which he’ll have to move back home the following morning to accept. Which he does. In one unforeseen fell swoop, our hero has vacated the scene, and with it the summer of chipped ham and No-Doz falls away behind us. As it does, I have my concerns about how we have split into two distinct camps, between Damon and Paul up north, Alan and me down here, and wonder if things will ever return to their former state, if we will ever be as tightly knit again. By this time, I’ve started going out some with Stacey. And Alan will soon have a serious girlfriend himself.
