The Best of Times

 

      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 I didn’t give off a great impression either, a pimply faced, chunky white kid with a terribly outdated bowl cut that screamed, “Virgin for life.”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.