We were mostly high at the time...

In the middle of my Freshman year of high school, my mother finally came to the conclusion that after having spent K-9 attending parochial schools, I may have had enough of the "religion thing" and relented to let me attend the public high school which was exactly 3 minutes from our front door.  However, tuition had already been paid for Freshman year.  So I was forced to endure one more semester of pompous rich kids, rampant drug dealing, and an art teacher who seemingly abhorred God's creation of the feminine form and thought all good art emanated from precisely duplicated bowls of fruit.  

I met Jeff my first week in the big old bad public school.  He was in my Geometry class alongside Ron, who was the only person I knew at the school when I walked through the door that first day.  Ron introduced me to Jeff and a few other screwballs sitting around us, and the shenanigans started brewing.  Around this time, Ron and I had watched some bad horror flick that featured a weird demonic voice.  It was something in the vein of Froggy belching hardcore prose.  Ron and I started goofing on one another in that voice and were getting some good laughs.  It wasn't a hard voice to mimic and a few others joined in the chorus of stupid.  Unfortunately, the teacher turned around right when Jeff finished saying something and issued a stern warning directed at Jeff, that he didn't want to hear that voice ever again in his class.  Even more unfortunately, before the teacher's head fully snapped back around to the board, I let loose a full throated, demonic, "Fuck you."  The room fell silent for a split second, and then the teacher turned around and started a tirade against Jeff about how he never wanted to see his face again in his room and expelled him from the class right there.  All Jeff's cries of, "It wasn't me," fell on deaf ears.  Well, I had made it nearly a week in the new school, and if the look Jeff shot me on the way out the door was any indication, I was about to get into my first fight in the very near future.  However, I did manage to avoid Jeff for a few days, as Geometry was the only class we "used to" have together.  When we finally did end up at the same place in time, I wasn't sure what to expect.  I figured I'd just take the punch.  After all, if you dissected the situation far enough, or really even just a little, I completely deserved it.  But instead of a crack to the jaw, I just got a, "Hey motherfucker," accompanied with a chuckle and a grin.  Fortunately for me, when Jeff was sent to another Geometry class, he was seated next to a girl named Andi, whom he quickly began dating within those few days.  Unfortunately for him, she was early on in a string of bad decision making as far as dating was concerned.  But that's a story for a different time.

Not too long after this, I found out that Jeff had his license and a car.  And not just any car, but a beast of a car that went by the name "Blort."  A '76 Vista Cruiser wagon, the color of bad mayonnaise, replete with fake wood paneling and a Delco tape deck mounted on the hump.  Well, that marked the end of campus lunches for me, and the beginning of a life-long friendship.  Jeff and I became thick as thieves.  And the Blort became our weapon of mass destruction.  Mailboxes and street signs were taken out with precision fish tailing technique.  Well, most of the time.  Eventual miscalculations led to the removal of all the handles on the passenger side.  But in the end, that sort of balanced out the fact that you couldn't get out on the driver's side.  Man, if that car could talk, the stories it would tell… But mostly it would probably just say, "Ouch."

Jeff and I ended up going to Columbia College together.  But then I bailed after the first year and went back to Indiana because I stupidly thought Business school was a good thing to do.  I lasted for a year at IUSB.  I realized quite quickly that I could no longer live in Indiana.  Growing up there, I had nothing else with which to compare. But living in Chicago for a year had exposed just how much South Bend was devoid of culture and filled with overt racism.  I got out the following summer as soon as I could land a job in Chicago.  However, being young and desperate lead me to agree to a wage of $5.50/hr.  But Jeff let me stay with him in a shitty little studio apartment for 6 months until I could get on my feet.  And we still didn't hate each other.  Well, at lest he never showed it…

Eventually, Jeff moved out to Phoenix.  His girlfriend, now wife, had inherited a house out here, and he decide that he'd had more than enough of Chicago winters.  And said house, is now where I find myself.  I've been hanging out with his wife, Ann, for the past week and a half.  Jeff is a freelancer and had to take some work, something I understand all too much.  But he'll be back on Sunday, so we'll get some quality hang time.  We've already been reminiscing on the phone during his nightly calls to Ann.  But for every two or three things I can remember, there's one that just sounds like a movie I've never seen.  But Jeff just shrugs it off by saying, "Well, we were mostly high at the time…"  Indeed…

Ann has been lovely.  I think she get's lonely without Jeff, and enjoys having somebody here.  Fortunately for me, she doesn't seem too picky about who that somebody is.  We went to Jerome this week, which is a quaint old copper mining town up in the mountains a couple of hours north of here.  Last week Friday, I went to an arts walk event that happens every month in downtown Phoenix.  I saw some amazing work at the various storefront galleries.  And I had some delicious street meat at an open-air market.  Right next door to that was an independent record store that had a band playing out front.  I spent a solid hour in the store and mustered enough restraint to only spend a little over ten bucks.  It was no small feat.  There was some good stuff there.  An original Superfly soundtrack, a German pressed Peter Gabriel III (Melt), and a pristine best of Funkadelic from '75.  But then I spotted the half price bins and found some things that I wouldn't feel compelled to take with, and instead just add to the collection at the house here.  Purchased items:  Jethro Tull - Stand Up (original press with pop up gatefold), Led Zeppelin - Presence (the forgotten Zep album), and the first New Order 12" single of Ceremony on Factory Records.

The bonus factor of not having Jeff around is that I have use of his car.  I'm about to get in it and drive to Tucson to hang out with my friend, Liz.  She and I are musical compatriots.  (Her old band used to open up for the band I was in with Sean.)  She's another Chicago transplant, and an amazing artist.  It should be fun.  And it's time to change the pace from just Ann and I watching cooking shows in between watching each other get drunk.  

In other news, Santorum.  Ha, haahaahhaa haahahahah...  Shit's funny…

PS.  That tweed blazer I'm wearing there did indeed have the obligatory patches on the elbows.