They
say good friends are hard to come by and that is a saying I believe
whole-heartedly. It’s not often you become so close to someone that when you
don’t even keep in touch with them as much as you should the two of you are
still like family. I have a small handful of people in my life that I consider
friends, but there is one person in particular that is like family to me and in
honor of his wedding, I’m writing this piece for him. Tyler, I’m sorry I can’t
be there for you today on your wedding, but I hope you’d read these words and
take them to heart as if I were at your reception giving you a ridiculously
long, reminiscing speech that would embarrass the shit out of both of us. So let it begin.
I will never forget the day that I met
Tyler and I’m sure he’ll never forget it either. His father, Rick, helped us
moved into our new home and as we were taking the boxes in, there he was, a
scrawny kid wearing khaki shorts, light t-shirt, and so many necklaces that he
looked like the vanilla version of Flava Fav. What a fag, I thought. I didn’t
give off a great impression either, a pimply faced, chunky white kid with a
terribly outdated bowl cut that screamed, “Virgin for life.” From the moment we
said, “hello,” we didn’t like each other one bit, and yet that didn’t stop our
parents from forcing us to hangout. I couldn’t stand being around this kid that
was always telling me how he was going to school me at this or that and making fun of my friend Stephen for being fat. But little
did we know that we had a lot more in common than our adolescent appearances
gave off and our disdain for each other began to wear off shortly after a
slumber party for his birthday. Before we knew it we were both making fun of
Stephen’s bitch tits and arguing over who loved orange juice more and so spawned
a friendship that I’m sure made our parents regret introducing us in the first
place.
We were freaking idiots and even though we
were becoming friends, we still had our bouts of competitiveness between each
other. You’re a Chargers fan for whatever stupid reason and I’m Broncos fan
because I love the heartache of watching my team get sodomized in the Super
Bowl. We were so competitive that we argued over the dumbest crap. I remember
the long conversation we had about who loved orange juice more. We seriously
sat on the phone for forty minutes saying stupid crap like, “I make two cans of
orange juice a day and drink all of it!” It wasn’t until our adolescent idiocy
joined forces that history was being made. I’m only going to share the bad
stuff though, because no one cares about our long nights of playing chest
(that’s what we called Chess), while we tried to drink an entire case of soda.
They also probably won’t laugh about the time your brother spilled Koolaid on
our couch (I think it was Tim anyway), and we nonchalantly flipped the cushion
over so my parents wouldn’t see it. Another boring story is the time we wanted
to make popcorn at like 1 AM but didn’t want to wake my parents, so we brought
the microwave into my room and covered it with pillows to keep it quiet. I'm surprised
we didn’t burn the damn house down. The real crazy stuff didn’t start happening
until we moved away from base housing. I’m about to share some stories that our
folks may not know about, but who cares, it’s not like they can ground us for
it now.
High School was where it was at, my friend.
Whether it was teasing Jared about his penny pinching lifestyle, (man I’ll cut
you) or trying to figure out a nickname for…well I honestly can’t remember his
name because we wound up calling him either Hockey or Butthead. For those of
you reading this, we didn’t call him that because he acted like a butthead, but
because he was one of the ugliest freaking people we had ever met. The dude was
pretty crazy though, especially when it came to hockey and Mountain Dew. I once
saw this kid hump a soda machine as a way to express his love for the beverage.
I remember walking through the giant hall of that school with you when you
would yell out crazy things like, “poopy dildo,” or “man she has big tits,”
when Amber came walking by. No shame, and I loved it! I still do. But do you
remember that time we walked past that senior who was wearing baggy pants so
large that Chris Farley could’ve fit into one pant leg with room left over? I
can’t remember the exact phrase you uttered when he walked by, but it sounded
something like, “Nice pants, faggot.” Ha! That nut job wound up cornering you
behind the bleachers in the gym. I would've punched him for you, but....
Speaking of gym, I blame that place for
turning us into thieves. We’d go lift some weights before walking into the teacher’s
office where he was selling candy, soda, and cookies. Now that I think about
it, why the hell was our gym teacher selling us that crap? It contradicts
everything that section of the school stood for. Anyway, we would stand in line
with the rest of the fatties thumbing the loose change we had. It was seldom
that we had enough money for even the cheapest item, but since that bald
bastard just had us toss the money in a bucket without checking if we had
enough, we would toss in the four pennies we had and walk out with a cold soda
and a package of cookies. Our thieving didn’t stop there either. We would come
up with elaborate schemes to steal from that crappy gas station over by my
house. They use to keep packs of cigarettes and cigars at the front counter and
we figured one of us could distract the cashier by asking them about the
movies they had for rent.
“Excuse me, do you have Jerry Maguire?”
I think we actually did pull off our one
and only heist with a scheme better suited for the situation. Dump a bunch of
change on the counter and snag our tobacco while the cashier counted it.
I’m sure it wasn’t suspicious of me to be wearing a sweater in July as I
slipped a tiny cigar up my sleeve, but whatever! Tyler, you’ll have to refresh
my memory here a little bit, but I remember leaving the gas station and you had
me walk out a head of you. So I did. This gas station was so trusting of its
patrons that it actually left stacks of 12 pack sodas sitting outside. My
memory is telling me that as I was making haste away from the gas station you
snagged a 12 pack and went hauling ass past me, which of course caused me to run
as well. You’ll have to tell me if that really happened or if it’s a figment of
my imagination that wanted to make that super stealthy heist that much cooler.
We never stole again, well, at least I didn’t. We’ve lived apart so long that
I’m not sure if you ever did anything illegal again after that.
Tyler introduced me to a lot of things that
my goody good life wasn’t used to. Porn, for example, was something I thought
only existed in those Victoria’s Secret magazines my mom had lying around the
house. Women in underwear? Yes please. But the Internet was just becoming a
bigger thing, (wow are we getting old enough to say, “back in the day?”) and
good old Tyler had an AOL log in and password. Jjay dot com was our JAM, and
the funny thing is that I never understood the name of it until I just now
typed it. I’m not sure how much later the Hun became a thing, but yeah. Our
clever little way of hiding what we were doing was to go to a bunch of clean websites
in order to push the naughty ones down the list. I think we deleted the cookies
as well, but I’m not sure we did it right because your dad busted us. I’ll
never forget the phone call where I foolishly tried lying to a man who most
likely coined the phrase, “you can’t bullshit a bullshitter.”
“So, Cody, what websites did you go to?”
“Um, food.com and sports.com.” My face must
have looked so stupid as I said that. The rest of the night was pretty bad
because my parents made me tell my brother and sister what we were in trouble
for. Looking at naked women on the Internet, a thing that the Internet would
later be most popular for. If I had the ability of quick thinking back then I
would have just told your dad that we were studying the female anatomy for a school
project. He still wouldn’t have believed the lie, but I like to think he’d get
a good laugh from it. And my dad had a sense of humor as well when he said to
me, “well, at least it was women you were looking at.”
You remember the time when we took my
parents blue car out for a spin in the middle of the day? You had a learners
permit, our cat, Soxy, had escaped, and we were home alone and bored as hell.
So we took a spin in a vehicle that had a stick shift, something we didn’t know
how to operate. So it was no surprise when you momentarily lost control and
went driving on to restricted land. It was a move so innocent, to us at least,
that caused the chick across the street to call the cops. So yeah, there we
were back at my place studying the female anatomy when a cop came to my house.
You sheepishly told him that you had a license but left it at home. Where was
I? He asked. Not looking at porn, sir, he’s in the shower. So yeah, he goes to
talk to the lady that called them while I soak my hair to make your lie look
valid. We got lucky that she didn’t press charges and I still think our excuse
for driving around was pretty solid. We were two teenage boys searching for the
stupid black cat that ran away a month prior, seems legit.
I remember the first time we took a car out
for a spin. It was your dad’s. We pushed that freaking thing down the hill,
started it up, and drove around. It ran a lot smoother than a vehicle with a
stick shift huh? That was our first time flirting with that kind of behavior,
but it was far from our last. We would then steal my dad’s Camaro when you
stayed the night at my house and on and on. The most epic, though, was the
night I was crashing at your house. We took your dad’s car for a spin, drove
all the way out to my house where, like a freaking ninja, I snagged the keys to
my mom’s van and took it out for a spin. We then met up with Nathan who also
managed to sneak out and snag his parent’s car. We were an awesome, under aged
convoy cruising the empty downtown streets of Rapid City where an unnamed
person broke rank because he thought he saw a prostitute. I will say that it
was not Tyler, but I’m going to go ahead and blame Nathan…
So much adrenaline was pumping through my
system that night and it was one to remember. But like so many of the crazy
things we did, one of us always got caught. Okay, I always seemed to get
caught. The funny thing about this next story is that a certain person from
your household had once accused me of being a bad influence on you after TJ
spoiled our epic plans one evening at your house. Little did she know, teh he he.
So I was supposed to meet up with my lady,
you know, because all ninth grade kids needed to be punctual when stealing
their parent’s car to go meet up with their smoking hot eight-grade girlfriend.
Younger girls, I was a stud! After picking her up I was supposed to go get
Tyler, but because I had left in such a rush I wasn’t as careful as I usually
was. If my mom reads this I fear I may get smacked again, but Tyler only gets
married twice and I feel that it’s finally an appropriate time to share it.
Usually I would roll that beast down the
hill before starting it, but time was of the essence. I locked my bedroom door,
jumped out the window, and started the Camaro up right there in the driveway.
Not once did I think, hey, it’s summer time and my parents had the windows open
in their room. I also didn’t think that my mom would be a tad paranoid with my
dad being out of town when she heard Kyle and Paige (my siblings), who just so
happened to be crashing in my mom’s room, telling her that someone just took
the car. She tried to come get me, but low and behold my bedroom was locked and
I was NOT answering it. Being the smart woman my mom is, she pieced the two
together and piled those tattle tails I call siblings into the van to come find
me.
That also happened to be around the time I
decided to come back near the house to make sure everything was copacetic. My
girlfriend sat in the passenger’s seat when I rolled up to the stop sign at the
bottom of the hill where our house sat. I watched in horror as the van was
backing out. I tried backing up myself, but the Camaro was a firm believer in
justice and wouldn’t let me. The gear was jammed so I pulled into the driveway
of the house right in front of me. I thought it was pretty witty at the time.
How the hell would my mom know? Oh, because she’s not an idiot, that’s how.
Still, I was at least paranoid enough to tell my ditzy girlfriend to hide in
the back. Sure enough the van stopped right where we were and mom opened up the
door and, in an extremely harsh whisper, told me to get my ass home. Remarkably
she didn’t think to check the back seat, but still, I’m pretty sure my girlfriend
saw my mom smack the shit out of me when I walked into the garage. She had to
walk a mile and a half home in her bare feet. I didn’t feel bad though; the
moron should’ve worn her shoes. Now I know that story was about me but I
remember being pissed off that we couldn’t hangout that night. You had left the
next morning to go see your mom for the summer.
I could literally write a book about all
the good and bad times I had with you, buddy. It just wouldn’t be right to
leave out classic gems like swiping beer from my fridge, chugging them outside,
and chucking the bottles into my neighbor’s yard, having entire conversations
in Pig Latin, and our insanely demented murder plots while we worked at the
Royal Fork.
“Linda, come quick!”
People just won’t laugh as hard as you and
I would when we think back at how pissed off our dad’s were when they caught us
at the arcade playing a game when we were supposed to be at the Royal Fork
waiting for them to pick us up. They kicked us in the ass and when we turned to
see who it was, we just turned back to the game. Hell, we were already in the
thick of it. And people won’t understand 80% of our stupid one liners that we
took from movies that I PROMISE no one would guess.”
“Remember me!”
“Your dad was a brave man, you should be
proud of him.”
“I am.”
People won’t get half of the crazy insides
jokes anyway. There’s only one person on this planet that would laugh if all I
said to him was, “peanut jar,” or, “Your bow tie’s on cwooked.” To everyone
else, “Game seven” means something completely different, and “Ranch Dressing
Runaway” is a story I’ll NEVER tell again. But with all this reminiscing and
joking aside, I can honestly sit here and say that you’re the best friend I’ve
ever had. When we moved to Cheyenne we were forced to live separate lives, but
that never stopped you from handing down life experiences to me after you
joined the military. You’ve given me very powerful words of wisdom in the most
difficult times of my life, including my current affair that is largely the
reason I cannot watch you get married today. We both have kids of our own now
and it seems like we have nothing left to do but be the men the people in our
lives need us to be. I’ve never had the pleasure to meet Sarah, but I know she
must be a very special person if you opened your heart to her. Regardless of
where life takes you, and regardless of how much maturing we’ll still endure, I
won’t ever forget how good of a friend you have been to me and I love you like
a brother. I wish you and Sarah the best and I certainly hope we can get
together soon.
PS:
For old times sake, I’ll raise a glass at some point tomorrow and give out one
last hearty, “Teh he he,” just for you buddy.
