Stone Tower

A Decade of Nachos, With a Side of Awesome

March 1998

"Do you like nachos?  They have like the best nachos here.  The. Best."

I shift in my seat--a bit uncomfortable in the suit I am uncharacteristically wearing--as I read the description of the nachos in the menu.  I wasn't quite sure sharing a plate of messy nachos during a job interview would make the "do" list in the career counseling office back at school.  Still, I didn't want to be rude.

"Ah, sure, that sounds good," I say.

As I sat in Newport's Brick Ally Pub for the first time, I was about two months shy of graduating college and on my first real job interview.  The Portsmouth branch of Raytheon had brought me down for a full day of interviews and put me up in a local hotel for two nights.  I had taken the interview mainly for the free trip.  The company where I had been working as a co-op up until that time had all but offered to turn my part time position as a super-intern into a full time role on the next project ramping up.  I had sent my resume in to Raytheon mainly as a safety move.  A free trip to Newport, RI was just a huge bonus.

"What do you think of downtown?  Isn't it great?" Lindsey asks.

Out the picture window just a pair of steps away from our table, the cobblestone road is packed with little shops and restaurants, looking amazingly like those old seafaring towns that I've always promised myself I'd write about in my novels one day.

"Yeah, it's awesome," I tell him.  "I've never been down here before.  I had no idea what to expect."

When the HR woman had handed me a copy of my interview schedule that morning, my eyes had immediately locked onto the distinctively female name slated to take me on a two-hour lunch and tour of the area.  A free trip to Newport and an extended lunch with a cute engineering girl?  This place really knew how to woo a guy!

Unfortunately, I discovered that my first lunch in romantic Newport was not to be with the cute, blond, be-speckled math major turned programmer I had envisioned.  Lindsey, as it turned out, was a six-foot-six Jamaican man about a year older than I was.  That disappointment aside, I was still having a good time.

"You know this could be where it all starts for you," he goes on, using a fork to take half a dozen of the most delicious nachos I had ever seen onto his side plate.  "Right here, this could be your beginning."

I look at him confused.  These weren't the typical interview questions I had spent the bulk of the night before practicing answering in the hotel mirror.

"Um, I guess that's true," I say.  "It's hard to believe in two months college will be over."

"And this could be it, couldn't it?  This time next year you could be sitting in this place with a whole new group of friends and a whole new life.  The girl you are going to marry could even be waiting around here for you.  And it all starts right now."

Lindsey spoke with such enthusiastic optimism that I found it impossible not to smile at the thought.  Driving down to Rhode Island for that interview, I had had no intension of even considering the job.  Truth be told, I had my dream job waiting for me back home.  There was no reason to be considering working for a major government contractor like Raytheon.  Still...

As I sat there looking around the restaurant, the thrill of the adventure Lindsey spoke of began to fill me.   I wondered who I would meet what kind of people I would come to call my friends.  How would it feel to move so far from home; to make a completely fresh start in place like this?

"Maybe this is God's plan for you," Lindsey went on.  "Maybe it's time to begin your life here.  Like really begin something,"

I take my first bite of Brick Alley's chicken nachos as I consider the words, marveling at how good they are.  

"You know something," I say.  "I think you might be right."

---

July 1999

"Can I ask you something?"

The cute girl across the table looks up from her menu, smiling warmly.  She has amazing blue eyes.  Had I noticed that before?

"Ah, sure."

"Okay, I know this is only our second date and everything, but do you think our relationship has reached the point where we can order something messy like nachos?"

She laughs out loud, and I give myself a little mental high-five.  Making pretty girls laugh is one of those things guys like me always take great pride in.

"I think we can handle it," she says.

I've known Kim less than a week.  We'd met a few days ago, bumping into each other online and then spending the better part of a night chatting on the phone.  After a pretty typical movie first date a few days before, I had invited her to come down and spent Saturday in Newport with me.

"You've love these," I tell her.  "They are the best!"

"This place is amazing," she says, turning back to her menu.  "I can't believe you live down here."

"Yeah, it's pretty cool.  I like it better in the winter, though.  All the tourists are gone, but all the restaurants and clubs are still open.  It's like our own private playground."

"Well, I think a summer hanging around down here with you sounds pretty good," she said.  "My friends are going to be so jealous."

"You should bring them down sometime.  We can get together with my friends and all hang out."

She smiles at the thought, seeming to make quiet plans even as I made the offer.  Kim and I had decided that we were going to have a summer fling together.  Nothing serious.  Just hang out together for the summer and have fun.  After arguably the best year of my life--spent goofing around southern New England with a group of new friends--a summer spent with this pretty girl at my side seemed too good to be true.

Still, since taking the job at Raytheon and moving down here, I was getting pretty used to things feeling too good to be true.

"After we eat, do you want to walk around a bit?" I ask.  "They have all kinds of shops and stuff.  It's pretty fun."

"Yeah, I'd like that."

"And then maybe tonight we could hit a movie or something," I added.  "There is a really cool old fashioned movie house around the corner from here."

"Or we could just rent something and go back to your place," she suggests, putting down the menu and taking a sip of her water.

I do well to keep my face casual and impassive at the suggestion.

"That could be fun, too," I say.

---

February 2000

"Guys, were you planning to order nachos as an appetizer?  Because I was thinking of getting them as my meal."

"Oh I was going to do the same thing," Jeff says.

I share a knowing smile with Jeff.  He understands the importance of nachos as well as anyone I have ever met.  Over the two years we had been friends, we had shared a bond in that.

"I can't believe you are finally leaving," Chris tells me.

"And I can't believe we finally got you to come out to lunch," I tease him.

Over the past year or so, Chris had made a daily habit of stopping by our cubicles at about 11:25 to check on our lunch plans.  Despite our wide variety of lunch destinations, though, he had never once opted to come out with us.

"Well, it's your last day," he says, looking over the menu.  "How could I say no?"

It is more than just my last day at Raytheon, it is also my last day of having a real permanent tie to Newport.  A few months back, I had moved in with Kim.  Our summer fling had ended--as these things so often do--with a fancy dinner in Providence and a shiny diamond ring.  Living a little over an hour north of the island had put something of a strain on an already less than ideal job.

"Hey when we get back, can I have the bridge?" Jeff asks me.

I smile wide at the question.

"It's all yours, man."

Another of our friends, Todd, had build a model of a bridge using drinking straws and scotch tape in his office in the weeks before he finally left Raytheon.  He had given it to me as a farewell gift--a sort of thank you for helping him with a trial project that earned him, in part, the awesome new job.  The idea was that the "magic" of the bridge would bring me luck in my own job search.  The fact that I had landed what was close to my dream job at a small analog design company about twenty minutes from my house increased the legend of the bridge tenfold.

"Can I have it after you?" Rens, the other guy out to lunch with us that day, asked Jeff, drawing a laugh from all of us.  He had been with Raytheon only about a year, but he, Jeff, and Chris seemed to be all that was left of our old group.  It seemed that my time at Raytheon--and Newport in general--was just about over.

"You know what I am going to miss more than anything?" I asked, closing my menu having long since decided on my own order of nachos.

They look at me with half smiles, waiting for the inevitable punch line.  I only begin to realize in that moment how much I am going to miss spending every day with such good friends.

"Lunch," I tell them.

---

November 2002

"Babe, just order your own nachos as a meal, and we'll get a couple orders for the table," Kim said, pulling the menu from my hands and ending my pointless mental debate over what to order.

"I don't want to be a nacho hog."

"It's your birthday!" she said with a wide smile.  "You get all the nachos you want!"

Eight of us are sitting a> long table in the back of Brick Alley.  Kim was three month pregnant that night, but she didn't let it stop her from throwing me a crazy birthday night out in Newport with stops at all of our favorite old haunts.  We'd gotten tattoos at our favorite shop in Middletown--well, Debbi and I got tattoos, everyone else had chickened out--gone for drinks at Coddington's, and now we were all grabbing dinner at my favorite restaurant before heading out to the Blues Cafe--Newport's answer to Dan Aykroyd's little place.

"All right, nachos it is!" I said, lifting up my shirt sleeve for the dozenth time in the last hour to look at the new tattoo on my arm.

"Still glad you got it?" Kim asked me.

"Oh god yes.  I am having the best night.  Thanks so much for all of this."

She simply gives me a quick kiss and smiles before returning her attention to her own menu.  Thankfully her appetite had returned with the start of her second trimester and eating out at awesome restaurants was a bit more fun for her.

"Jason, what did you say you were this year again?" Ginger called out to me from the far end of the table where she and Crystal are talking with Todd and Jesse.  "A binomial number?"

The girls giggle as she asks the question, both still not quite used to life with a certified math geek married to one of their best friends.

"No," I correct her, "my birthday is a binary number--November tenth, one-one, one-zero.  But as of tonight, my age is a perfect cube."

They burst out in a fit of laughter, clearly not sure what a perfect cube is but decidedly amused that I am so excited by the prospect.  They look to Todd and Jesse, expecting them to find my explanation just as entertaining.  But my friends--as fine math geeks as I have ever known in their own right--just nod along with wry smiles.

"Dude, you are twenty-seven this year?" Todd asked, drawing a loud wave of laughter from the whole table.

I laugh along with them, feeling happy and justified in my exponentially significant milestone birthday.  And I also feel so tremendously lucky to be sitting with so many friends in what has to be my most favorite spot in the world as I mark it.

---

August 2008

"Babe, are you drinking?" Kim asks me as we slide into a small table deep inside Brick Alley.

"Ah, if you are driving back to the place I am."

She just smiles as she slides the drink menu over to me.

"All right, then," I tell her, "let's get this vacation started!"

We've officially been on vacation for a whole hour, having had just enough time to drop our bags off at the bed and breakfast and head downtown for a drink.

"This is probably the last real vacation you're going to have for a while," Kim says, "I want you to live it up!"

I nod as I look over the drink menu, having no trouble taking her advice.  I've just started a new job--an entirely new career, actually.  It's an amazing opportunity and I can't remember a time in my life when I've felt better about what I did for a living, but the one downside is my vacation time over the next few years will be severely limited.

"I can't believe we are finally here," I say, handing the menu back to Kim after deciding on the triple-shot chocolate martini.  "It's been way too long since we've been down here."

"Well you've got four whole days to soak it up," Kim says, looking over the drink menu herself.  "Let's enjoy it while it lasts."

We had rented a small beach house--a beach house located about three miles from the actual beach, but a beach house nonetheless--for the week with some friends.  I was only staying for the first half of the week, though, heading to New York City midweek for a writing conference.

"How many times do you think we can eat here this week before we get sick of it?" I ask.

Kim gives me an amused look over the top of the menu.

"I'll come as often as you want," she tells me.

Looking around the familiar restaurant, I feel at home.  So much has happened to me since the first time I sat in here.  I've made friends I never expected to find, found a career I never knew existed, and come to understand what I wanted to do with my life with a clarity that I had never thought possible.  The last decade had brought me a wife, a daughter, and a better, stronger, happier version of myself.  And through it all, there had been delicious, wonderful nachos to mark each and every step on the path.

"Are you two just having drinks today?"

I pull myself from my thoughts and find our waitress standing over us, her pad and pen ready to take our order.  Kim and I lock eyes across the table and share a wide smile.

"We're going to have some nachos, too," we tell her together.

Grandfellas

One of the really strange things about my adolescence is that I never became "too cool" to hang out with my grandparents.  My parents I feared being seen with like any normal kid.  I remember having a panic attack one night in the tenth grade when my mom decided it would be fun to eat dinner in the food court of the mall.  I imagined the place filled with my fellow students, all out on their own doing really grown up stuff and talking to girls and...and there I was eating a slice of Sbarro with mommy and daddy.  It was mortifying.  I nearly passed out.

But with my grandparents (my mom's parents, just to catch everyone up), it was different.  I think it had a lot to do with the fact that around the time I entered high school my grandfather basically decided I was awesome.  I have no idea why he came to this conclusion, but from about age fourteen on, I was the heir to the throne.

This wasn't the typical doting of a grandparent.  My grandfather was never one to dote.  Until I hit my teen years he treated me like the goofy little crybaby that I was.  He was never mean or anything like that.  He was just a man who made his feelings clear.  I was a decent kid, but it’s not like I was about to set the world on fire.

But all of that changed as I got older.  Suddenly I was brilliant, clearly smarter than anyone in the family (aside from him, of course).  I got a job at the local supermarket, which seemed to gain me several levels in manliness in his eyes.  He had owned a grocery store at one point in his life, so I think he had a special respect for it.  Truthfully, the supermarket was the only place I could find work when I turned fifteen.  But if he saw it as a special bond between the two of us, so be it.

I started becoming a math and science guy about this time too, which my grandfather saw as the wave of the future.  While the rest of the family (my parents, my uncle, and my sister) wallowed in silly things like teaching and sales jobs, I was about to make my mark and change the world.

"Hey, Jason, I had an idea the other day," my grandfather said to me one night I was over his house for dinner.  "You know how a car engine turns the wheels?"

"Um...yeah, I guess," I said, taking a bite of my third cheeseburger.  I loved cheeseburgers--still do, actually--and my grandfather made it a mission in life to make sure I was well supplied at any meal.  If I ate less than four in his presence, he took it as a personal insult.

"Yeah, well what if you hooked a belt onto the wheel and fed it back to the motor?"

Oh boy, I knew where this was going.  I tried to interject, but my mouth was full of juicy burger goodness.

"You see?" he went on, smiling at his own cleverness.  "This way you don't need gas!  The car just runs forever!"

"Um, you can't do that," I said, washing down my burger bite with a sip of warm soda. 

My grandparents always kept their house stocked with soda just for me, but refused to put it in the refrigerator.  It wasn't a space issue.  There was always plenty of room in the fridge.  They just preferred to keep two or three two liter bottles sitting on the counter by the stove in case I happened by.

"What do you mean you can't do that?"  He started getting a little angry now, as was his habit when questioned.

"Well...what you are describing is a perpetual motion machine," I told him, quite sure he had never heard the term before.  "It's physically impossible to construct a device that is one hundred percent efficient.  It would violate the laws of thermodynamics."

He went quiet for a second, thinking over what I had just explained.

"Yeah, but you could do it," he said, nodding his head in excitement.  "You're smart!"

That's how my grandfather saw me.  An eager young kid who worked hard, loved his cheeseburgers, and was too smart to be limited by the pesky laws of thermodynamics.  I dare say that no one in the world had--or likely will ever have--as much (admittedly misplaced) confidence in me as that man did.

On the other side of the coin, I had to admit I thought my grandfather was pretty damn cool in his own right.  He was a giant italian guy who could--and often did--crush walnuts in his fist while playing cards.   He was a day trader more than a decade before there were day traders.  He had a Wall Street Journal delivered daily, and every day he would pour over the listings on the dining room table with his broker on the phone--a rotary phone, mind you.

And there were romantic--and likely wildly exaggerated--tales of his, shall we say, less than respectable youth.  There was something about a fish truck that doubled as a rolling casino on Saturday nights up at the beach--those stories were always halted quickly by my mother just as they were getting started.  My grandmother liked to tell me the story of how he came to her rescue when they were in high school and some guy planned to stand her up for the prom--something about just using her to make some other girl jealous.  I guess my grandfather was on to the guy and swooped in to fix things, opening the prologue to our family in the process.

So I guess my grandfather and I had a real Ray Liotta / Robert De Niro thing going on...but early in the movie, before Joe Pesci gets killed and all the cocaine stuff.  Actually, come to think of it, I guess our relationship eventually did end the same way as in the movie--but that's another story.

Anyway, because of all of this, even in my adolescent too-cool-for-the-world phase I never thought twice about hanging out with my grandparents.  We'd go out to eat, I'd come over to help them fix the VCR, and they'd routinely call to check in.  It was all very cool.  And when they decided to take a four day road trip to sightsee in Canada--the spring of my junior year in high school--I didn't think twice about tagging along.

We hit Montreal and Quebec (roughly about nine hours north of where we lived) and did all the touristy things.  I had five years of French under my belt, so I knew enough to read the street signs and annoy the hell out of waiters.  My grandparents were thrilled to have me along.

On our last night in Quebec, the concierge at the hotel told us about a special medieval style dinner show that he had tickets to.  My eyes lit up at this instantly.  I loved--and still love, quite frankly--anything medieval.  This, of course, meant we were going.  If it was something cool that Jason would enjoy, then sign us up.

My grandfather was also very excited that he was getting a deal on the tickets through the hotel.  The man loved getting a bargain.  He'd go to three supermarkets a week, just to hit all the sales.  And here we got a show, dinner--dinner without forks, but dinner--free refills on soda and wine, and a bus ride to and from for one low price.  There was even a two hour shopping excursion after the show where we got to hit all the little shops with coupons from the hotel.  How could you go wrong?

(side note, I bet Kim just picked up on where this is going...)

And so, after going up to change, we headed outside to wait for the bus.  It was just the three of us and about thirty college kids, out for a Saturday night of fun.  We all boarded the bus and began our thirty minute ride to the theater/restaurant.  My grandmother--ever the friendly type--happily chatted with the college kids the entire way, much to my grandfather's slight annoyance.

The show was fun...and all in French.  I sort of translated for my grandparents for most of it--though inferring a lot more from body language than any mastery of French.  Still, I could tell my grandfather was impressed.

Neither of my grandparents drank wine--and I was too young, even by Canadian standards--but, much to my grandfather's delight, I easily drank our ticket price in soda to make up for it.  I would imagine the rest of our group enjoyed the show a lot more than we did judging by the frequency the "bottomless" pitchers of wine were being replaced around us.  By the time we got back on the bus, the happy college kids were significantly happier than they had been on the trip over.  I mean way happier...like, maybe a few of them should keep a bucket on their lap on the ride back just in case happier.

Thinking on his feet, our bus driver made a command decision.

"Ok folks," the driver said over the loud speaker.  "I think we are just going to head straight back to the hotel.  We'll skip the shopping thing."

A half cheer / half moan of approval slowly made its way up from the back of the bus.  My grandfather, however, was decidedly unamused.

"Excuse me," he said, moving up to the front of the bus, "Can we at least have twenty minutes?"

My grandfather had paid for a shopping excursion and--drunk spring breakers be damned--he was getting a shopping excursion.

The poor bus driver turned back with a pleading, hopeful look that quickly withered under my grandfathers unamused stare.

"Well, ah...I guess we could stop for a bit, sir," he said.

Even at the time, I felt for the guy.  He clearly had a situation here.  I am sure there is a whole course in bus driver school about avoiding just this kind of thing.  The last thing this guy needed was a retired couple and their goofy grandson keeping him from getting these kids home before things got out of hand.

And so the bus stopped in old Quebec, amidst a chorus of decidedly unhappy grumbling.

"Ah, we're just going to stop for a few minutes and let these folks have a look around," the bus driver nervously announced. 

I did my best to ignore the groaning protests behind me as I followed my grandparents out of the bus.

"So you folks just want to take a quick look around, right?" the driver asked as we stepped out.

"Just give us fifteen minutes," my grandfather said without really looking back.

We took a quick walk around one block, mostly window shopping the little souvenir shops.  Despite my grandfather's repeated assurances that we had every right to be out there, the little shopping trip was anything but relaxing.  As we came back out to the main street, I caught sight of the bus driver frantically peering through the crowd for us.

"All right folks, are you all set?" he called once he saw us.  His question had a panicked yet hopeful quality to it.  My grandfather--seemingly having proved his point--let the man out of his misery.

"That's fine, we'll head back," he said as my grandmother and I exchanged relieved looks.

So after our three minute jog around the block, we made our way back to the bus.  And by this point, the friendliness of our college friends had completely evaporated.

"Assholes!"

I froze mid-stride in the narrow aisle as I heard the taunt.  I felt my grandfather--just a step behind me--tense with rage.

"What did you say?" he asked the crowd in front of me over my shoulder.  "Did you say 'assholes'?"

At this point I was fairly certain I would be ending the night in a Canadian hospital, recovering from a stab wound I took defending my elderly grandparents. 

Seriously, what was he thinking?  I’d spent my entire childhood riding busses and learning the rules.  When you are a tall, lanky math geek in thick glasses, you don't make a fuss.  If the cool kids scream insults at you, you quickly sit the hell down and pretend you never heard it.

But as I turned to look at my grandfather I saw a brief glimmer of the guy he'd been at my age.  In his expression, I saw a guy who was very used to taking control of the situation.  A guy who looked as though he'd be very at home behind the wheel of a fish truck.  And a guy who was never, ever called an asshole in front of his wife and grandson by some drunk-ass punk sitting in the back of the bus.

"Ah...nothing, sorry."  The faceless voice from the back of the bus held a lot less bravado now.

My grandfather just shook his head angrily as we finished making our way back to our seats.  It was as if we were letting those kids off the hook rather than narrowly escaping a potentially dangerous situation.  It was a strange twist on how things like this normally went in my experience.

We made it back to the hotel without incident, and by the next morning my grandfather was more frustrated that we'd missed out on the shopping trip than anything else.  Even though I still believe to this day I came pretty damn close to getting caught in a drunken bus brawl that night, I think I left Canada with a little more respect for my grandfather.

And, for better or worse, I've learned that when someone calls you an asshole on a bus, the last thing you should do is quietly sit down.

A First Time for Everything: Trading Pizza for Quarters

It's 1980...or somewhere there about.  Five year old little me is sitting happily in a pizza shop booth waiting for delicious, cheesy goodness to come out of the oven and onto his plate.  The rest of my family--seemingly less concerned with dinner--is huddled around some big machine next to the chip rack.  My mom holds my younger sister up to watch as my dad fiddles with the controls.  She is excitedly offering advice as she shifts the squirming two year old from arm to arm.

"Wait...wait...wait...jump!"

My dad's feet stay firmly planted on the ground, yet for some reason they all cheer wildly.

Unimpressed, my eyes wander back to the pizza counter, almost willing my dinner to be ready.  Five year old little me loves pizza possibly more than anything else in the world.  He and 32 year old me are a lot alike in that respect.

As I take a sip of my soda--this was the point in my life where adults began insisting I stop drinking half a gallon of milk a day and start drinking soda...those who know me well can appreciate the irony--my family lets out a collective groan.

"Let's give Jase a guy," my mom says, "I bet he can do it."  My mom called me "Jase" well into my twenties, which I guess was slightly endearing if increasingly annoying.  By contrast, my boss at my last job called me "Jase" around the office, often in staff meetings in front of other grown men.  That was significantly less endearing...and downright creepy, to be honest.

As they all turn to me expectantly, I slowly slide out of the booth.  I'm not quite sure what they are talking about--and in fact, I am quite sure that if my dad couldn't do "it" then neither could I--but I just shrug my shoulders and head over to join them.  Anything to help speed up the hellish purgatory that is the time between ordering pizza and actually eating it.

My dad drags over a plastic chair from one of the empty tables and lifts me up to stand on it.  As I come to eye level with the machine's screen I lock eyes with a cartoon monkey tossing barrels down a cartoon construction site.

"Uh, what do I do?"  I foolishly turn away from the screen as I ask the question.

"Move your guy, get him up the ladder!" my dad says, pointing emphatically at the screen.

Amid a chorus of excited instruction from both my parents, I take hold of the little black control stick and send the chubby little man running to the right, towards the first ladder.  In that moment, as my actions begin to control something that is happening on a TV screen, I feel a joyful buzz rush over my body which momentarily replaces all thoughts of warm, delicious pizza.

"Get ready...get ready...jump now!" my mom calls out.

"How do I jump?"

Even before I can get the question out, a now familiar chorus of disappointed groans fills the air behind me.  As I watch, my poor little man is demolished by one of the rolling barrels just steps away from the ladder.

"The red button," my dad tells me.  "You'll know next time."

"Twenty-six?"  A voice calls from behind us.

I turn to the counter to see our pizza--the up until thirty seconds ago number one obsession of my life--steaming on the counter.

"Come on, let's eat," my dad says, helping me down off the chair.  "We'll try that again sometime."

Strangely intrigued in a way I don't quite understand, I move back to my seat, my thoughts slowly--if less enthusiastically--moving back to pizza.

"Can we try that again after we eat?" I ask as my mom puts a way-too-hot-for-the-likes-of-impatient-me slice onto my plate.

"Well, we don't really have time today," my dad says, "but we can go to an arcade sometime if you want."

"What's an arcade?" I ask, carefully testing the different areas of my slice with my finger.

"A place with a bunch of games like that one," my mom says. 

My head swirls trying to grasp this new bit of information.

"You mean there are more games like that?"

My mom simply nods as she begins cutting up a slice of pizza for my sister.  She has no idea what has just happened; how this quiet night out for dinner has completely changed the world for me.  How the next decade of my childhood will be counted by high scores, extra lives, and levels beaten.

"Eat up, Sport," my dad says, pulling me out of my happy daydream.

My dad called me "Sport" for most of my childhood.  Unlike my old boss, however, he had the good sense to start calling me "Jason" after my twelfth birthday.

"You know," I tell them with my mouth full of now sufficiently cooled off pizza, "I think I like video games."

Oh, five year old little me, you have no idea...

Standing at the Edge

I'm standing at the edge now. One step and it begins. Am I ready? Have I prepared all that I can? Am I good enough? The road will be different this time. The world will be new. But I've done this once before, and in a way, I know what lies before me.

I see a valley, beyond that mountains, rivers, an ocean. I see a cast of characters clamoring for my attention, waiting for me to breath life into them. I see an oppressed people waiting for their champion. I see that champion lost and alone. I see an evil man and understand him. I see a world desperately waiting for the story I am about to tell.

It is terrifying and exciting all at the same time. I doubt myself, and I waste weeks that turn to months standing on this edge. The world is frozen, the people stagnant. They look up to me, begging me to take that first step. I plan and map my route again and again, but I know these are just excuses now.

I know where I want to go; I've known for a long time. I know the road I wish to walk through the wilderness before me. I know where I plan to end up and what the world will look like when I get there. But I also know that once I take that step this world will cease to be in my control.

Once I step off this edge, I'll be just a part of this world. A major part, of course, but a part just the same. The characters and beings I've breathed life into will each take control in his or her own way. I'll struggle along with them. Not to fight them, but to stay with them. To furiously follow them as they weave in and out of the safe, logical road I have planned out for them.

They will surprise me, and events I never planned will sadden me. I'll grow to love people I never imagined caring about and discover flaws in those I imagined perfect. And I'll gladly follow as they stray from my carefully planned path, cheering them on as I franticly record their every thought and emotion. This world I see before me will become alive. All this once I take that first step.

Still, I fear. Those nagging questions. Am I ready? Have I prepared all that I can? Am I good enough? This world is counting on me to bring it to life, and it can't afford for me to fail.

Behind me I can still see the world I've just left behind. Two years I spent there, learning and watching. It looks so different now than I originally imagined it. It's bigger, darker. I've armed myself with everything I learned there to prepare for this next journey. I'm ready to be better than I have ever been. Will I be?

I hear them calling. They are anxious to start, and I have stood here too long. I let the excitement and anticipation build up inside me. The time for doubts and excuses is over.

The world starts as a blank page, but only for a moment.

I step from the edge...

"Mark, why does life have to suck so bad?"

"Hey, Jay, you know that girl Ally?"

"From work?"

"Yeah."

"I guess, what about her?"

"I think I'm going to ask her out."

"What?"

"I'm going to ask her out, like to the movies or something."

"You're just going to walk up to her and ask her out? Just like that?"

"Yeah...why?"

A few minutes of stunned silence pass.

"Dude," is all I can manage for a reply.

Perhaps I should set the stage here a bit. My best friend Mark and I were about a month shy of our eighteenth birthdays when that conversation took place, driving around in his burgundy '87 Oldsmobile (pre-Nirvana stickers) to nowhere in particular. We both worked at the local supermarket (I had gotten him the job there a few months before) that year as we started our first semester at Merrimack College. Between passing each other in the quad and bagging groceries together thirty hours a week--to say nothing of our frequent propensity to ditch class together--we had sort of become inseparable.

The girl he was talking about, Ally, was one of the new cashiers at the supermarket. Every fall a new batch of high school juniors would come in to replace the group that had left over the summer to go away to college. A few of us, Mark and I included, stayed at home, though, to become veteran front end workers. I, myself, was an assistant head cashier--and was still young and foolish enough to believe that was cool. Eh, that's another story entirely, though.

Anyway, Ally was pretty cute. She was tall with chestnut brown hair and a slightly squeaky, Boston accent heavy voice that was incredibly endearing in 1993...but by 1995, as it would turn out, significantly less so. She was also one of those people with an overly outgoing personality, and she dressed like she was on her way to interview for a legal secretary position...in a sexy Leah Remini kind of way. And she'd talk to everyone she saw (which tended to hurt her items-per-minute numbers--and again 1993 me was actually enough of a tool to think that mattered to someone) and was something of a toucher.

"Jay!" she'd say, clasping my forearm with both of her tiny, ring covered hands, "I screwed this up! I ran this guy's milk in twice. I am so embarrassed!"

"It's okay, Ally," I'd say, reaching into my pocket with my free hand for the register key, "I can just void it out."

"I'm so sorry, sir," she'd tell the customer, patting him apologetically on the arm. "I'm new!"

Mark wasn't really a loser or anything, but at the time Ally seemed ridiculously out of his league. To be honest, though, any girl seemed out of our league back then. We were probably just being overly self conscious (or perhaps I should say he was, my self consciousness was in many ways justified--did I mention that I considered holding those register keys a point of pride?), but that night when he told me his plans to just walk up and ask this cute girl out I thought he had lost his mind.

Jump forward about three days.

"Hi Jay!" Ally's chipper voice calls to me from across the checkout area.

I look up to see Mark coming through the automatic doors with Ally happily hugging his arm the entire way. As they walk over to where I am bagging some faceless customer's order, Mark wears the triumphant expression of a man who has just taken his first steps into a larger world (they had just come from an innocent night at the movies--don't get too far ahead of me here, kids.)

"So we're dating now, is that okay?" Ally asks me, giggling.

"Um...I guess so."

"I mean Mark's your best friend and all, right? So I just want to make sure you like me. You like me, right? We have fun when we work together, right? I just don't want--"

"I like you, I like you!" I tell her, probably over packing a cheep plastic bag with cans. "It's totally fine."

"We're just picking up Katie," Mark tells me, his voice strangely two octaves cooler. "What time do you think she'll be getting out?"

This was code. I was technically in charge of the front end (I was the assistant head cashier, after all. It's a wonder Ally wasn't hanging off my arm, huh?) My pal was basically asking me to send Katie, Ally's best friend, home early. This was a bad idea. Katie was on until close, which meant she was there to help with cleanup before the rest of us went home. Sending her home now would put us one girl short for breakdown--keeping the rest of us there late and adding to the "hour overages" my boss was always complaining about.

"Let me check the window sheet," I said, tossing a final bag onto the faceless customer's carriage and likely squishing his loaf of bread in the process.

I sent her home. I knew I was sending her home before I even started to count how many girls I had on for the night. That's just guy code. Your pal needs to look cool in front of his new girl, you do what it takes. It's not like it's on my resume or anything that I had all of us there until 10:30 that night trying to catch up.

From that day on, things changed drastically. My best friend had a girlfriend. Up until that point, my entire experience with the dating world started and ended with reruns of Saved By the Bell. But now here was a guy I knew, with a girl, all because he had just walked up and asked her. I wasn't exactly cruising the strip on Saturday nights, but I was looking at the world a little differently. Maybe pretty girls weren't so unapproachable after all...

It wasn't all good news, though. For the next several weeks, I pretty much never saw Mark. I understood, and was honestly just happy for him. As I said, Ally was pretty cute, and, as it turns out, was not averse to letting my pal slide into second on a regular basis. Besides, I had plenty going on myself. My classes were going well, I had joined the theater group at school, and there seemed no end in sight to my supermarket career. There was even a stage crew girl from school who--thanks to Mark's inspirational feats--I was just about ready to start thinking about asking out. She wasn't terribly cute, but she liked to make small talk with me between scenes on a regular basis, so I figured that was my in. Mark, it seemed, had other plans.

"Okay, you have a date Friday," he announced one day while we were at work.

"I'm sorry, what now?"

"Yeah, Ally set it up," he said. "Her name is Nicole. You're going right?"

I stared back at him awestruck. Later, I would come to understand that he took my silence as me trying to think of a way out of this. Really I was just racking my brain trying to find a way to say, "Oh my god yes! Woo Hoo! Boobies here I come!" in a cool, restrained manner.

"Come on, dude," he said as my brain started to invent a little booby song that I still sometimes sing to this day. "It sucks that we never get to hang out anymore. This way at least we can double and stuff."

"Huh? Oh yeah, I guess that would be cool."

Smooth.

Later that night, as my excitement fell back a little, a wrinkle in this whole plan occurred to me. I had never heard Ally (or anyone else for that matter) mention this Nicole girl. More to the point, Katie--Ally's bestest friend in the world--just happened to be single at the time. Why weren't they setting me up with easily-a-nine Katie who was adorable, sweet, and liked to chat with me when I bagged for her (we had that whole "my best friend is dating your best friend" thing going)? I quickly decided that was a question that was best left unanswered and went to sleep thinking up cool things to say to the mysterious Nicole when I met her. ("That's right, baby, I'm the guy who approves the checks under $50. Growl!")

Friday couldn't have come soon enough. Nicole and Ally were babysitting, and so Mark and I came over after work (I did rush home to change first) at about 11. Nicole was a nice girl, but it wasn't exactly love at first sight. We made awkward small talk as Mark and Ally madeout in the kitchen, and at one point she found an excuse to rest her hand on my leg, eradicating any lingering thoughts of Lisa the stage crew girl from my mind forever.

So Mark and I left that night just two guys with girlfriends. The next few weeks were a magical time, all handholding and talking pointlessly on the phone for hours on end. While we didn't have much--well, anything--in common, we got along pretty well. Looking back, Nicole and I didn't so much "like" each other as we did "like" the idea of having a boyfriend/girlfriend. In hindsight, I can see we were really just friends who madeout on occasion. Not that it was a bad thing. In fact, I think it was pretty much all either of us was ready for at the time.

A couple months later, a new wrinkle popped up. The whole plan had been for Nicole and I to get together so that the four of us could hang out. But as the weeks rolled on, it seemed we never did.

"Why don't you ask Ally tomorrow if they want to go out with us Saturday?" I asked Nicole one night on the phone, with my sister impatiently staring me down from the kitchen (up until that point she'd never had to share the phone).

"Uh, I probably won't see her, why don't you ask Mark."

"What do you mean you won't see her? Don't you guys have lunch together every day?"

"Oh, I don't sit at her table."

"What? Aren't you guys like best friends?"

"No, I hardly know her. She just came up to me at lunch one day and asked if I wanted to meet this cute guy."

I'm pretty sure she added the word "cute" to the story, and I paused to enjoy that. Still, what the hell?

"Then why did they set us up? I thought the whole point was so we could all hang out?"

"I guess Ally just figured we'd be good together," she said with a mindless shrug I could almost see over the phone.

Oh, that's right. We're in a relationship. I'm not supposed to think of you as an interchangeable fourth wheel four our group who occasionally lets me see her boobies. Good thing the logic behind that comment went over your head. (Cut me some slack, I was eighteen).

Things were actually worse than that. As Ally and Nicole got to know each other they discovered that they hated each other. Double dating was pretty much out from then on. It wasn't all bad. I saw Nicole probably once a week or so, and over the next year I got to do all the fun dating things most people experience in high school. It got a little awkward as I started my sophomore year of college (I felt a little creepy picking up my high school girlfriend from that point on) but she seemed to really like me, and hey I probably wasn't going to do any better.

If Nicole and I took our cues from Saved by the Bell, Ally and Mark were reading from rejected scripts of Melrose Place. They were on again off again, fighting one minute then steaming up the car windows the next. There were impassioned notes written in purple pen and stuffed into pockets. There were screaming fights in parking lots and hastily purchased pregnancy kits. It was in a word: awesome.

See, looking back today--with my 32 years of worldly experience--I can understand that being in a tense, emotional relationship like that sucks. But then, at eighteen and in the tamest of polite relationships, it looked so god damned cool.

Ally would show up at my house late at night, tears running down her face, begging to talk to Mark--who would be hiding in my basement. She would act incredibly jealous all the time, asking him if he thought this girl or that girl was pretty--don’t even ask about the time we dropped by her house over the summer and Mark dared to glimpse easily-a-nine Katie in her bikini. At the end of one particularly vicious fight, she tried to win him back by crawling on top of him in the driver's seat of his car and whispering (in what I can only assume was a sad, penitent voice) that she wasn't wearing any underwear.

I wanted all of that! The drama, the borderline insane neediness, the begging him to be with her, promising she would do whatever it took. It looked so wonderfully awesome.

Now don't get me wrong, I was (am still am, I like to think) the furthest thing from misogynistic. I wasn't looking to toy with the emotions of some slightly unstable girl just to boost my ego. What was attractive to me was the idea of someone wanting to be with me as badly as she wanted to be with Mark. Here she was practically having a mental breakdown over the thought of him leaving her, and on the other side I was with a girl who couldn't be bothered to see me more than once a week--if she wasn't babysitting that is. I didn't see Ally's stalking, mood swings, and slightly inappropriate sexual advances as a cry for help as much as I saw them, in a weird way as romantic acts of love (the "boom box" scene from Say Anything comes to mind). And I couldn’t help but think that if I was with her instead of Mark all that drama would be put to a more positive end.

This ignorance on my part would ultimately lead to Mark seeking a new best friend a few years later, for reasons best illustrated by the time Mark and I attended our good friend's graduation party. Early into the party, we noticed Ally and Katie driving by the house over and over and over. Mark was mortified and considered leaving so that she didn’t ruin the party, but I thought it was the funniest thing ever--and perhaps a touch romantic. After about an hour, I went outside, stood in front of the house and waved cheerfully as they passed by for the dozenth time. I am pretty sure Mark wanted to punch me--and I kind of wish he had.

Two minutes later, their car pulls in. Jamie (our friend having the party) came out to smooth things over. He was nearly pulled into the car (he's kind of a little guy) as Ally caught him in a death grip with both hands on his forearm and begged him to get Mark. I remember standing in that driveway wondering why Mark didn't come out and see her. Didn't he want to get back together with her? How could you not love a girl who would make a fool of herself like this to show you how much she cared? I just wanted to scoop her up, take her somewhere romantic, and have endless conversations about our emotional needs and promise to never, ever leave her.

Yeah, I was a little emotionally warped back then.

Now through all this, sweet, adorable, easily-a-nine Katie remained strangely single. Stupid, gullible, not-really-getting-the-whole-picture-here me took a while to catch on as to why.

Over the course of this whole saga, Mark would often talk about Katie; how nice she was or this funny thing she said. Sometimes we'd be out driving (we did that a lot, just two guys driving around in a car aimlessly) and mysteriously find ourselves passing by Katie's house.

"I just wanted to see if she was home," he'd say.

"Huh...well, why?"

"I don't know, just to see."

"Yeah, how do you know where her house is? We're kind of in the boonies here."

"I just do, okay? Drop it."

Through it all, Mark insisted nothing was going on with Katie. Even so, it soon became pretty obvious that they at the very least "liked" each other (and that was clearly the reason I was with not-even-close-to-a-nine Nicole instead of her), and that perhaps they were secretly in love--a love that could never be. In Mark's own warped view of romantic love, I think that's what he wanted: a tortured, illicit relationship that was sadly thwarted at every turn. I think a large part of him loved being miserable, and pining away for sweet, adorable, easily-a-nine Katie while stuck with her "psycho" best friend just fit the bill perfectly. It was all very Emo, but about a decade too early (I think we called it Goth back then, kids).

Mark pretty much told me everything that happened with Ally, but he would only confess things to me about Katie in bits and pieces. I am sure he made a play for her more than once, only to be lovingly rejected in a way that left the door open. Reading between the lines, I think one night he made one final bid. Talking in his car after work, he told me her response:

"Mark," she had asked him, "why does life have to suck so bad?"

He just sat there in silence as if that just summed it all up, and while I was pretty sure it didn’t, I had no idea what else to say.

After that conversation I saw Ally differently. Before she'd always been "psycho-chick" without a cause, but now I had to wonder. Was she really a controlling, slightly insane girl or was she really just a normal girl--with the same insecurities we all have--whose first real boyfriend was messing around behind her back with her slightly prettier best friend? I felt a little guilty in that moment because, even if I hadn't taken it all very seriously, I had always taken Mark's side in the major fights. And while I don't know exactly what happened with Katie, my gut tells me I was on the wrong side.

That conversation seemed to end things, and Mark and Ally broke up for the last time. Mark left school and went out into the real world soon after, which I imagine put all of the drama with Ally and Katie into perspective. Mark and I grew apart rapidly after that and eventually lost touch completely when I moved away a few years later.

I saw Ally one last time before I hit the big reset button and moved down to Newport--probably about two years after their last breakup. Out of nowhere, she and Mark had strangely decided to be friends, and they asked me to go out to dinner with them to celebrate--just three pals hanging out, talking about the old days. It was beyond awkward. Mark got drunk passed the point of coherent conversation (he was a quiet drunk) and disappeared outside for a while. Ally and I just superficially joked about the old days, and how much more mature we were now that it was all behind us.

I got the sense how far things had come later in the night, after we moved to the bar to share a few drinks, when Ally returned to the table.

"Oh what was I thinking? I shouldn't have left that!" she said, sitting back down.

"What?" I asked.

"My drink, I shouldn't have... Jay, tell me the truth, did Mark put anything in there?"

"What?" I was a little unnerved by how she was staring into my face, trying to tell if I was lying or not. "Of course not! Why would you think he would?"

"You can tell me, Jay, I won't be mad."

"Ally, trust me, we would never do anything like that."

She considered it for a moment and then picked up her glass and took a sip. I guess I can take some solace in that she trusted me at least, but Mark was never the same after that conversation. Driving home, he crawled into the backseat of my car and grumbled for me to turn up the Tom Petty CD he had brought, and tuned us both out. As I said before, I moved away soon after that last night out with Ally and Mark and her strange accusation of attempted date-rape. I never saw either of them again.

It's been almost a decade since all of that happened. Part of me--perhaps the part watching a little too much Journeyman--has always felt that if I had been a little more mature or emotionally aware back then, I could have prevented most of what happened instead of really just making it worse. Maybe I could have helped Ally just move on or talked some sense into Mark. Really, though, we were all just dumb kids caught up in some giant drama that would hardly matter in a few years. We just didn't know it. But I guess that's how we grow, and how we figure out that the things we think we so terribly want aren't quite what will make us happy at all.

Despite everything, though, I'd like to think that Mark and Katie did end up together eventually. I sometimes imagine that they bump into each other at the supermarket years later and in minutes are laughing about what a couple of emotional teenagers they had been. And that chance meeting leads to dinner, just to catch up, you understand. But soon one dinner moves to two and then three, and before you know it, those two crazy kids have started up again right where they left off.

And maybe--just maybe--still adorable, sweet, easily-a-nine Katie sent Mark off to work this morning with a kiss and smile, then turned back to the counter to finish making lunches for little Zack and Emily and thought to herself, "you know, I guess life doesn’t really suck so bad after all."

And for the record, I married an off-the-scale-ten Kim. Now leave a comment you lovable jealous fool.

Tall Blonds in Short Skirts

A deserted, mid-afternoon airport.  A thirty-something blond, somehow managing to look all business in her three inch heels as she sips on a serious drink at the end of an anything but serious airport bar, her oversized coach bag sitting passively on the table beside her.

A mild-mannered, unassuming business writer over-laden with bags, in his search for a good place to grab lunch on the company's dime. 

The recipe for a fun romantic comedy perhaps featuring the sadly underrated and in badly need of a career boost Heather Graham?  Or perhaps something far more dangerous?

"You're late," she says, without bothering to turn around.

"Traffic was murder."

"Interesting choice of words."  She turns to face him, a teasing smile creeping across her face.  "And here I thought you were getting all squeamish on me."

The man doesn't respond, but takes a seat three stools down from her, casually looking over the drink menu.

"You have it then?" she asks after a few moments of silence, her cool appearance dissipating just for a moment around her, letting him catch of glimpse of her impatience and was that desperation?

"Would I be here if I didn't?"

"I'm not here to play games."

"Funny, it seems you played plenty with Ben before you left him in that freezer."

A storm of anger crosses her face, and she takes a long sip from glass.

"That was different and you know it," she says, any trace of a smile now long gone.

He stands up and pulls some cash from his wallet.

"We'll see," he says, dropping the money on the bar in front of her.

"I've got it," she offers in a half-hearted protest, which he ignores.

"Did you at least fuck him first?" he asks, venom filling his voice.  "Knowing the lecherous old bastard, he might have considered it worth the price."

She turns pale at the words, and if he hadn't known her better he would have sworn her eyes began to well with tears.

"It was business."  Her words come in a rasping whisper now.  "It didn't mean anything."

"I'll remember that," he replies, assuming a mockingly pensive tone.  "And speaking of business, let's finish this."

"This isn't over," she says, standing up and taking her bag.  "You're not Ben.  I would never--"

"Save it," he says too quickly, a bit of his own hurt and anger slipping into his carefully practiced demeanor.  He is quick to recover.  "I just want this done with."

She stares at him for a long moment, and then, as if turning a switch, she composes herself almost instantly in the next. 

"If that's what you want."  She's again looking at him with the dispassionate, icy mask he knows all too well.  For a moment he can't help but wonder if those hard, emotionless eyes were the last thing Ben ever saw.

"It's too late for what I want, isn't it?"

If the jab has any effect on her, she hides it perfectly.

"After you hear the alarm you have two minutes.  You understand?"

He only offers a nod in response.

"Let's go then," she says, before turning down the hall and walking off.

He doesn't move right away, but neither does she look back.  Despite everything, a small part of him begs to call after her, begs to make one last grab at a happy ending.

"Two minutes," he mumbles aloud to himself, as he buries the feeling with more than a little effort. 

Happy endings were for suckers, just like tall blonds in short skirts.

Sort-of-Friends

It was the fall of 1986.  Kirk and Spock had left the Klingons behind to get in touch with the majestic humpback whales.  Elle Macpherson graced the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue in a slinky teal one-piece.  And--ironically as it turns out--the Dionne Warwick hit That's What Friends Are For was racing up the charts.  It was a simpler time.

I was just a goofy, awkward eleven year old then, just trying to make my way through the perils of sixth grade.  Under a mop of shaggy, Beatles-esc hair and behind a pair of ridiculously thick glasses, I lived day to day, somehow finding ways to survive the new and horrible decimal math, the precursor to OZ that was our lunch room, and the dreaded field on the far side of the building, where even the teacher's aids working recess duty feared to go.  It was harrowing, and essentially a loner for most of my childhood years, I faced it all on my own.

A good survival tactic I developed that year was to become "sort-of-friends" with people.  I had several groups of sort-of-friends strategically placed around.  There was the group of five guys--I never did learn their names--who would let me sit at the end of their lunch table every day.  We never really spoke, but if I stayed quiet enough and pretended to be lost in thought, it almost felt like I was part of their group.  Then there were the guys at recess who occasionally let me into their game of freeze tag.  I was great for freeze tag.  I was big, clumsy, and slow and never complained that I was "it" for the entire game because of oddly suspect "shields" rules or because contact made by tripping the "it" guy as he chased someone didn't count as a tag.  Hell, I was happy just to be out there.  But my best sort-of-friend ever had to be Chris.

Chris and I had met in Cub Scouts a few years before.  Outside of school, things were slightly better for me.  I'd typically be in a controlled environment with an adult around making sure everyone was included and no one got picked on.  The group would be much smaller, statistically improving my chances of being included by default.  And usually, if I worked things right, there would be one other guy in the group more weird and pathetic than I was.

In our scouting group Chris wasn't the coolest guy--though he desperately wanted to be--and I wasn't the lamest one.  A guy named Keith held the cool spot--he'd become our patrol leader by sixth grade--and the official lamer role was Kenny's, even if by a small margin.  I wasn't exactly quarterbacking the touch football games when we went camping or anything, but with Kenny around drawing the spotlight, I could almost pass as normal.

So for the couple years leading up to sixth grade, I laid the groundwork for a nice sort-of-friendship with Chris at our scouting events.  When Kenny was there to be the punching bag for the group and Keith wasn't around as the clear choice, I was Chris' right hand man.  It was the closest thing to a real friendship I had ever had, and by the time we were in sixth grade together--in the same class for the first time--I started thinking we might make the jump to actual friends.  We weren't talking to--or in his case even acknowledging--each other in school or anything, but no relationship starts out perfect.  After all, it took Han almost a whole movie to warm up to Luke, right?

St. Monica's--the church that sponsored our scout group--had one of those weekend long "fall harvest" fairs every year, and that year our troop was assigned one of the booths.  Methuen was a small enough town back then that the fair was something of a big deal.  It always seemed like you'd see everyone in the world there.  They had all the carnival magically-transforms-from-the-bed-of-a-truck rides, games that looked super easy to win but oddly weren't, and tons of other stuff to waste your dad's money on.

On the Saturday night of the fair, Chris and I were scheduled to work our troop's booth--which meant my dad was stuck hocking the cotton candy and popcorn all night while the two of us goofed off.  In one of his "cool dad moments"--something I've only come to recognize in hindsight through my relationship with Erin--he pulled a crisp ten out of his wallet and handed it to me.

"Why don't you and Chris go get some tickets and hit up some rides," he said, handing me what I considered a small fortune.  "Have fun."  I probably didn't even say "thank you" before snatching the money from his hand and rushing off to find Chris--I was something of a selfish, entitled brat at eleven--but I am guessing he got the point. 

I was having trouble containing myself as I looked for Chris.  We had ten bucks to blow at the fair!  Rides, games, irresponsible amounts of candy were all ours for the taking!  I was thrilled, but by a lot more than just having the money.  We were going to be just two guys hanging out on our own at the fair, checking stuff out and causing trouble.  That was what friends did, right?  It was going to be something out of the movies or at the very least an episode of Perfect Strangers.  For the first time in my life, I felt like a normal kid.

I found Chris straight away and told him the news.  He was excited, and we quickly rushed to cash in half the money for ride tickets.  We headed straight for the tilt-a-whirl, my favorite ride, and got in line.  I loved the tilt-a-whirl.  No one could get the car spinning like I could, and that night I felt so good I knew I was going to tilt and whirl the hell out of that thing the second we got on.  Heck, maybe we'd even go twice.  I doubted it had ever been done before, but we were just two pals at the fair with pockets full of ride tickets.  There were no rules!

I was talking excitedly for a few minutes--sharing my insane plan to actually ride the tilt-a-whirl twice in a row and set a new kid world record--when I noticed Chris had stopped listening.  I looked up the line and cruel, bitter reality slapped me neatly across the back of the head--not unlike my mom was wont to do, come to think of it.  About twenty people ahead of us were two of the cool guys from school--and worse still--two of the cool girls with them.  Why were they with girls?  Didn't we hate girls? 

"What are you doing hanging around with him?" one of the guys called to Chris.

I'll always remember Chris' response not because of what he said but because he said it without any hint of hesitation, guilt, or shame, as if what he was saying should have been exceedingly obvious to everyone around, including me.

"Oh, he's paying," he yelled back. 

In that moment, I felt everyone at the fair stop what they were doing and stare at me.

I wasn't expecting him to throw his arm around me and declare to the world that we were now best pals, but his tone was just so simple and matter-of-fact that it knocked the wind out of me.  I was sort of pulled out of the space time continuum for a moment and given the depth to understand what an idiot I had been.  We weren't hanging out together.  We weren't pals.  Chris wasn't Han swooping in behind me to get my back while I took the shot on the Death Star.  Damn it, he wasn't even Biggs!

"Come on up with us," the cool kid called back.  "We'll fit."

I still didn't understand why anyone would want to ride the tilt-a-whirl with girls, but Chris seemed excited by the plan.

"Come on," he said, pulling on my jacket.  The ride was stopping and people were getting ready to load on.  "We'll get on this one."

"You go ahead."

"What?  Why?"

I was numb and--even at eleven--more than a little surprised he didn't get what had just happened.  For a second, as he looked at me with that dumb happy-go-lucky smile he always had, I considered going off on him.  I thought about just unloading all the frustration I felt that everyone else in the world got to have friends and have crazy nights at fairs and actually eat lunch with people.  I just wanted to yell in his face, "What the hell was so wrong with me?" 

But I didn't.

"I don't really like the tilt-a-whirl," I said with a shrug. 

It seemed like a flimsy excuse to me, but he didn't give it a second thought and rushed to join the cool kids.  Despite the presence of the girls, they seemed to have fun as I watched from the side.  Five kids can really get a tilt-a-whirl spinning--even if two of them are clutching purses.

Chris went on to spend the rest of his half of the tickets with those guys, but I didn't watch.  I headed over to the games tent and spent the rest of my dad's money trying to win a radio at one of the booths--it looked so easy!  How could I lose six times?--before trading in the rest of my tickets for a sausage sandwich and a soda.  I found a quiet place to hide and eat and killed a little more time before going back to our troop's snack booth.

"Hey, did you have fun?" my dad called as he saw me.

"Yeah, it was great."

"Where is your buddy?"

To this day I don't know why, but I was always terrified that my family would catch on to my loser status, as if I hid it so well and the fact that I wasn't going to the mall every weekend to hang out--and apparently talk to girls now, as if I didn't have enough to worry about--had somehow eluded them.

"Oh, Chris met up with some guys from our class," I said, trying to sound nonchalant.

"You didn't want to go with them?"

"Nah, you know..."  I trailed off, hoping he would drop it.  He did.

It would probably be a cute ending to write that Chris and I finally did become friends, and we laugh about that night to this day, but no.  The truth is I didn't see much of him again after that.  He left scouts the next year--I think he joined up with the baseball kids instead--and by seventh grade we were in different classes again. 

The real ending is that I gave up on sort-of-friends after that night, and after another year of eating lunch alone I started seventh grade by meeting some other guys in the same boat.  The four of us became friends--actual friends--and things got better.  Though to be honest, I was still always worried--and maybe even still am a little today--that my new pals would find someone cooler ahead of us in the tilt-a-whirl line.  We held together though.  And eventually, we figured out why it's fun to ride the tilt-a-whirl with girls.