I always think of these great posts I want to write about food but then I forget to snap a picture or get caught up in the daily grind and never managed to make the meal I had planned. So here's a wrap up of what's recently been going into my mouth.
Last week the wife and I made the mistake of not filling up on breakfast before we headed out to the boys' first football games and we paid handsomely for it.
This week we were slightly more prepared: we made it to the stadium early enough that I was able to duck out and head down the street to Bagels On The Hill for some breakfast bagels.
It's hard to get real, fresh bagels in the area, not like the bagels my Jewish mother-in-law gets that's for sure.
But these bagels came close and my breakfast was cooked to order because this ain't a fast food chain folks.
This bugger was tasty although nothing at the moment can hold a flame to Blitz's Market morning eats down at the shore...
Made this last week for dinner because it is quick and easy.
It's the infamous chick can recipe and it's always an easy way to cook a bird.
This version was an olive oil, cilantro, lime and salt and pepper rub with the cavity stuffed with garlic, red onion, orange/red peppers, zuccinni and halved limes.
I then poured out half a can of beer and shoved it into the cavity and placed the chicken on a pie backing dish for the greasy cast off.
Cooked it at about 325 degrees for about two hours (or until the drumstick easily tears off) and then served it with rice.
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, we ourselves flash and yearn, and moreover my mother told me as a boy (repeatingly) "Ever to confess you're bored means you have no Inner Resources." I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored. Peoples bore me, literature bores me, especially great literature, Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes as bad as Achilles,
who loves people and valiant art, which bores me. And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag and somehow a dog has taken itself & its tail considerably away into the mountains or sea or sky, leaving behind: me, wag.
Both my sons played their first games of football last weekend.
My 5-year-old played a game of flag football and it was as expected - like herding sheep. Kids ran in all directions and general confusion ensued for the first half of the game. By the second half most of the kids had started to grasp the "don't move until the ball is hiked" concept.
This game was followed by his older brother's, who just happens to be playing tackle football.
And he couldn't be more excited about the prospect of game days in full pads.
Much like the opening game, there was plenty of confusion at the start. They don't have enough players on their team to actually scrimmage each other. It appeared early on that the concept of facing opponents, some decidedly bigger than them, was daunting.
My son, who plays running back, got the ball a few times. He also made a few nice tackles. I was glad to see that he wasn't afraid to stick his nose in there and get dirty.
Then it happened: on a broken play up the middle, he scampered outside and made it to the sidelines, then turned and headed up field, a chase of about five players behind him.
He crossed midfield and the parents in the bleachers started to scream.
I'm sure my friends in California could have heard me yelling, "Run! Run! Run!"
One of the larger kids was on his tail and began to gain on him.
They crossed the 20 yard line and one of the opposing team's coaches yelled, "Dive!"
The team that was set to play next now had lined up on the sidelines and were cheering him on.
The kid dove...
And missed!
And a roar came up from the bleachers and the sidelines and pandemonium broke loose among his teammates as they ran to congratulate him in the end zone.
I don't think I've ever felt that kind of pure joy in my life.
My son had just scored his first touchdown in his first football game on a 60 yard, knuckle-biting broken play.
I wanted to cry.
Parents came up to me and asked me, "Is that your son?" with gleaming eyes.
"Yes, that's my boy," I said proudly pondering how they would view me next week if I just fell down and cried tears of joy.
Then he had to kick off.
And play safety on defense.
He got juked bad and the kid scored.
He came out for a rest and some water but while he was out their quarterback got the wind knocked out of him. So he went back in as quarterback. He later told me he was scared because their quarterback kept getting sacked. But after getting sacked twice himself because the textbook hand-offs he was attempting were left with confused running backs going in opposite directions, he just kept it on third down and bootlegged his way around the corner for a decent gain.
Then the first string kid came back in and he went back to running back.
They may have lost the game but boy howdy did seeing my son score a touchdown tickle my spine in a new and unfound way.
Well a few weekends ago, just as summer was coming to a close, my oldest son and I went to the Chapel Hill Public Library for one of their book sales. My youngest didn't want to come but he did request that we get him a book on "skateboarding, snowboarding or dinosaurs."
When we got there the stock was pretty much picked over and we weren't having much luck with our searches.
I did managed to get another Ross Macdonald book as well as replacing my copy of Ray because a few years back I passed on my precious, tattered and worn copy to one of my nimrod friends.
We didn't find any action sports or dinosaur books for my youngest but I knew we needed to come home with something. He's got a mild obsession with aliens but the alien books I saw would surely have crept him out more than entertain him.
I rummaged through a bunch of kids' books boxes and finally just grab bagged a book from the depths.
It was called The Frog Who Wanted To Be A Singer. It's a book about a frog who wants to be a singer but is told that frogs don't sing. Against every one's better judgement, the frog labor's on in the face of adversity and finally manages to pull off singing his song in front of an audience.
And it becomes a huge hit.
I have read my fair share of kids' books, most drive you bat shit insane with their quaint rhyme schemes and second-rate graphics, but this sucker fucking delivered!
It reminded me of the time I tried to tackle writing a story for kids. A friend of mine was part of this "write a book in a month" web site and convinced me I should sign up. Now I have enough unfinished writing that nags at me that it seemed like a silly thing to do.
And quite honestly, a waste of time.
But as a writer I'm always looking for a good way to exercise my chops without the frustration of having to rewrite a chapter or fine tune a character that has been in my head for years. So I signed up and said I would try and tackle a children's book.
As you can see from the excerpt below, I derailed from my original plan quite quickly...
Willie The Worm
“My name is Willie,” he said.
“Hello Willie!” said the crowd, some seated on fold-out chairs, others standing by the walls of the activity room of the local Unitarian Church.
“And I am a worm,” he said.
“Let’s welcome Willie with open arms and hearts,” said a whisker-scratching Harold, who was clearly the moderator here tonight.
“What if you don’t have arms?” chimed out that old crow Terence from the back.
“You know what I mean Terrance,” said Harold. “Must you do that every meeting?”
Then Harold turned back to Willie. “You may continue,” he said.
It all started when Willie began hanging out with the moles. They would go and dine on freshly-fertilized soil and then sit back and wait for their buzz kick in. The moles would tunnel endlessly and let the kaleidoscope of colors exploding in their heads guide their way.
At first it was fun for Willie. He’s slither behind his mole buddies riding their newly dug tunnels like a water slide at a theme park.
It was a blast.
The one day Marty didn’t show up for the party. They sent out a search party to find him. But the search party returned with bad news.
Marty had passed away.
“One too many trips to the DDT cabbage patch,” said a snarky Steve.
They memorialized him by doing what they do best: getting wasted.
A few weeks later, Willie had his own close call when he nearly drowned in a mud puddle because he was too far gone to get his butt out of it. So he stayed above ground for a few weeks, living under rocks and inside leaf piles until he could get his head straight. One thing he knew for sure: no more tripping with the moles.
It was his good friend Gary, a bulbous grub, who told him about the meetings at the church.
“But the church is a people place,” said Willie.
“Peoples can be cool,” said Gary who was cool like a jazz musician.
So Willie took his advice and now he found himself staring at a crowd of strange faces all wanting to hear his story.
“Wow, that was some story,” said Carrie the cow from the back of the room. “Makes kicking my salt lick habit seem like a game of Chutes & Ladders.”
“Willie,” said Harold. “Listen to me: When your friends start dying, it’s time to change your lifestyle,” he said. “Do you hear me?”
“I do Harold,” said Willie. “I guess that’s why I’m here… to, to, to get help,” he said with a hard swallow.
“Rehab! Rehab!” squawked Terence.
“I think you’re right on this one Terence,” said Harold as he took his back paw to his ear for a scratch.
“The boy needs to dry out and sober up,” he said.
The pastor – a tall, slender man with graying temples – rolled out a wheelbarrow. With shovel in hand he scooped up the poop left behind from the meeting and cleaned up the batch of compost he’d left as a snack for the rodents. He then genuflected at the front of the altar and made the sign of the cross. He said a short prayer in silence for God’s troubled creatures who had just left the building and then went out back and dumped the contents of the wheelbarrow into the church’s community garden.
Willie didn’t like rehab because he never slept. And when he did sleep he had the most horrific nightmares. His dreams were an amalgamation of memories and hallucinations. One dream his had over and over again was the dad he watched his father die. It was a memory he could never shake and one night as he lay awake trying not to return to the horrid memory he can to the conclusion that he got loaded to erase the past.
So Willie surmised that if he could confront the one reoccurring bad dream, then it was be one giant step toward facing life sober. But then he drifted off back to sleep…
“Willie, c’mon!” he dad yelled. “Hurry up goddamn it,” he said angrily. “You’re putting our lives on the line!”
Willie and his father we making a calculated risk trying to get from one side of the creek bed to the other in search of a food source and possibly a better home. Exposing themselves was a great risk and one his father ingrained into him over and over again.
“I know Dad, I know!” said Willie. And as he said this he went over the litany of dangers in his head. They were birds of every variety to fear: crows, owls, eagles, finches, woodpeckers… you name it. Not only that, but there was fowl and snakes and mice and all kinds of dangers out there. But one was the most dangerous of all: the fisherman. And it was at that moment, when Willie thought it, that the fisherman appeared behind a thicket of holly bushes. His boot barely missed squishing him. Just as he was catching his breath the fisherman’s dog came sniffing around, licked up Willie only to spit him back out on the ground.
“Hold up!” said the fisherman. “What do we have here?” he said.
Willie can’t remember much after that, or rather he tries not to but suffice it to say he had to watch his father be turned into bait.
Seeing you’re fathered skewered on a fisherman’s hook is not something you easily forget and suddenly Willie stirred from his dream and awoke.
Tropical Storm Hannah arrived in the late afternoon on Friday. The hype was in full force yet my 8-year-old still managed to have football practice in the rain. The brunt of the storm wasn't due to hit the area until the middle of the night, so practice was held in what could be referred to as a Seattle sprinkle. Kudos for the coaches who stood out there for two hours and taught the game to fledging Mosses, Mannings and Manns'.
I got several WTF? phone calls from my wife during my two hour stint sitting under an oak tree watching practice. But honestly, at no point did the weather seem life threatening. There was no thunder and no lightening... just a steady, fine mist of a rain.
It wasn't until much later that the ass whoopin' came and still it was mild in comparison to other storms I have encounter here in North Carolina.
We didn't get the word that my boys' football games would be cancelled until about 7:30am on Saturday.
Once we got the news, my wife and I laid in our bed with the window open and just listened to the rain; about every twenty minutes it would surge hard then cut back to a trickle.
Seeing an opening in unscheduled time (a rare site these days with school, football and work), I convinced the boys to make us a pot of coffee which they did and then brought us our cups in bed (how sweet is that?). Feeling the need to satiate my inner gourmand, I headed to the kitchen and whipped up some huevos rancheros for the wife and I while some Cornell Campbell wafted through the house.
You know, the one from a few years back about how they do more by 6AM than most people do all day...
I got up at 7:30am and made sure the kids had breakfast. It wasn't a breakfast of champions as the cupboards were bare so they turned to Kix cereal with soy milk and a strawberry pop tart each. Then I corralled them into brushing their teeth and getting dressed while I made them lunch.
As I was making lunch, I threw in a load of laundry - I had it in the dryer by the time we left for school. Oh, and I changed the kitty litter because today is trash day so it just made sense.
I had a pang in my heart for my youngest; he's going through growing pains and is now realizing that school happens everyday all day and he's not happy about that. Plus it appears he has inherited the seasonal allergies that wreak havoc on his older brother and me so the little fella was a wee bit tired - from school and from a stuffy nose that kept him from a good night's sleep.
After I dropped the boys off I came home and took a shower because I stunk like an ashtray from the show my band played last night in Raleigh. I didn't get home until close to 1am because the city had all these streets closed off for today's celebration of the new convention center. With the street closings and all the construction that the city has seen, I got all turned around and lost my bearings. By the time I readied my ship and got to I40 to head home, I was greeted by the cops who had closed off the west bound ramp. So I got on the east bound ramp and figured I'd just go down one exit and turnaround. But as soon as I got on the interstate I was greeted by more orange cones than I could count and an assload of blinking lights.
Guess the city decided to re-stripe that part of the interstate and I have a hunch it was on account of the previously mentioned celebration because once I got past the city it was nothing but open road.
I also needed to go to the grocery store but to do that I had to manhandle my bass cabinet out of the wagon.
The grocery store was mobbed.
Of course because there's a hurricane headed our way and people like to clog the grocery stores in the name of preparation. I can't blame then, the hype is heavy on Hanna even though the poor bitch has been downgraded to a tropical storm. I have been on the receiving end of poor hurricane preparation and it wasn't pleasant and that was before I had kids.
And then I had the good fortune to have one of those baggers who likes to put like three items in a bag. I should have done it myself like I usually do but the bagger was already halfway into it by the time I finished unloading my cart. Suddenly I felt bad about how environmentally unfriendly my trip to the store had become... then again we do have a rain barrel and we still do use the bucket in the shower.
It's not even noon yet.
I'm not even halfway done with what I need to do today.
Hurricane season is shaping up to one real mother what with Gustav just landing and Hanna, Ike and Josephine lined up like a string of pearls off the coast.
North Carolina has a long history with hurricanes and since I moved to the Tar Hell state in '95, we've had 8 notable ones that have made landfall, ones with names like Fran, Bertha, Bonnie and Floyd.
I'm about 160 miles from Wilmington which isn't that far by weather standards but I had to find that out the hard way. When Fran came through in the summer of '96, some friends and I decided we would stay up and watch the doppler radar on the Weather Channel.
The rains came heavy but soon it got late and we all retired to bed.
"Hurricanes are nothing," I thought.
I had lived through the Northridge earthquake just a couple of years earlier - I felt I knew what total destruction was and what it could look like.
At some point in the middle of the night I woke up to what I thought was someone knocking at my door.
Nobody was knocking at my door.
No, but my little mill house was getting pelted with trees branches and other debris.
The next day we woke up to one of the most gorgeous days ever only to be greeted by power outages and fallen trees. Suddenly you realize how dependent you are on electricity: for money, for food, for communication.
Fran left her mark alright, plowing through beaches towns and straight up I40 through Raleigh and on to Durham, Chapel Hill and Carrboro. Some people I knew didn't have power for weeks.
Weeks.
Crazy shit.
And that's why sometimes things can get tricky when you try to explain these things to kids. You don't want to scare them so that every time they hear the word "hurricane" in passing they'll start to freak out. Yet at the same time you want to instill in them the importance of being informed and prepared.
And to respect the power of Mother Nature.
That said, I'll take a hurricane over an earthquake any day... at least you can see it coming.
School started this week and with it came a whole lot of drama.
The school has swelled past its student limit in recent years and now the campus is littered with trailers which, as it turns out, still isn't enough so they have decided to do some construction.
However, due to the construction of the new wing, the school has changed the procedure for drop-off and pick-ups: you can no longer park your car and walk your kid into school or park your car and pick your kid up from school.
Anybody who has ever spent any time in long car lines knows that having the option to park and avoid the shenanigans is key.
I really only need to endure it in the mornings as both kids will be taking the bus home (although the first two days the bus was 45 minutes late. WTF?).
When you go to your kids' school's open house, they give you a list of things your kid will need to bring in for the following year. Usually this involves things like rulers, wipes, notebooks and your basic scholastic swag. But this year my 3rd grader needs to bring in a flash drive.
School starting is a mixed blessing; I'm excited my youngest is going to school but it seems like only yesterday he was being born. It's hard to make the transition even though I have been looking forward to it for so long. Not only is my youngest officially out of the nest, but it also signifies that my job as a stay-at-home-dad is drawing to a close. Not that I couldn't find a job - like freelance writing - where I work from home, but rather the day in/day out sheep herding of infants and toddlers has come and gone.
I'm happy and sad at the same time.
I guess that's why I had that dream where all my teeth fall out the other night.
There was the beach trip to the Jersey Shore to see family and I lost my lake virginity.
But now it is fall, the boys have started football (flag for the youngest, tackle for his older brother) and the future most certainly must be brighter than the recent past.
In the spring of '87, I was a freshman at Salisbury State, a small college on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. It was March and my brother was set to get married to his college sweetheart (on his birthday no less) in Pennsylvania.
I was living off-campus with my roommate Crazy Marty, playing rugby and barely going to class. These were the days before cell phones and emails so I didn't find out about my brother's bachelor party until the last minute.
I had missed my opportunity to catch a ride back home with some of the kids I knew who often made the 3-and-a-half hour trip. They call campuses like these suitcase colleges because a majority of the students went home on the weekends.
So I was sitting around with my rugby friends lamenting the fact that I was going to have to miss my brother's bachelor party when one of them chimed in, "why don't you hitchhike?"
He went on to explain that it pretty much was a straight shot down US 50 with not much in between. They convinced me without a doubt that it would be easy to score a ride. All I had to do was get a ride from Crazy Marty to the liquor store on the outskirts of town and find a eastbound traveler.
I managed to land one pretty quickly and the guy happened to be from my home town... but he was only going as far as Cambridge. Depending how you look at it, this could have been a crucial mistake because now I was farther away from school and in a town few stop at on the way out. I set up camp in front of a store with my duffel bag and waited.
And waited.
Bored of waiting, I figured I would just start walking and eventually I would find a ride. So I crossed the bridge and started walking. My logic was that with each step I would only get closer to my goal; sitting on the side of the road seemed like a waste of time. That was until I walked for about two hours with my thumb out and didn't have much luck.
It was then, looking out at the vast nowhere in front of - and behind me - that I started to curse my friends for what now appeared to the most ridiculous of all ideas. Out there on the open road, I had a lot of ideas to ponder.
And that's when a car pulled off the side of the road in front of me. I saw the reverse lights come on and I knew I had a ride.
He told me he was headed to Pennsylvania and that he figured he needed some company for the long ride. He had recently been divorced and had come down to visit his brother in Ocean City. His brother, so he claimed, was a major drug dealer at the beach and he'd done partied enough and decided it was time to head back home.
There was some general talk of drugs and cops and other hazards of his brother's occupation. As we spoke he reached into some sort of olive green army bag and scooped out a handful of bullets, waved them in front of my face and said, "Nobody is going to fuck with me."
"Fuck me," I thought.
Always one to face the most darkest times with the most driest humor, I bellowed out, "Now why would you need those?"
It was then that he reached under the driver's seat and pulled out a mayo jar full of a white powdery substance.
"Because I've got all this blow I need to unload," he said.
Great, here I am in a primer grey Ford Pinto station wagon with some guy tweaked out on blow who appears to be packing heat. He's got loose lips and a few hours to kill on a drive and I became his guinea pig passenger. I blew through my arsenal of stories about rugby hi jinx fairly quickly and had to labor through him endlessly bitching about his ex-wife and all the hot coke sluts he banged back at the beach.
"I'm not lookin' for a relationship right now, just lookin' for some fun youknowwhatImean?" he said while elbowing my rib cage.
Caught up in conversation - and wanting to avoid any possible confrontation - I didn't have the heart to speak up when we came to the DC/Baltimore split. About twenty miles later when he noticed a sign for Baltimore he recalled that I had originally stated DC as my destination. He offered to turn around but I insisted Baltimore was okay. My sister lived there after all so I was going to have to just roll with the plan.
When we got to Baltimore, he thanked me for the conversation and I thanked him for the ride.
There I was standing on the edge of the Inner Harbor looking for a pay phone with my head up my ass.
I rang up my sister and explained the situation.
Living in the city, she didn't have a car but her boyfriend did and she'd have him come get me. Once again I decided to split the distance and started to walk towards my sister's place on Calvert Street. But at some point I got disoriented and switched streets. It didn't help that I had only met my sister's boyfriend once and wasn't sure who to look for. Suffice it to say I ended up walking most of the way before I got the smarts to call from a pay phone and give the cross streets on the corner I was at to him.
He was an English teacher and Dead Head and the cool guy whose class everybody probably wanted to take. Intrigued by my adventure, he was eager to hear my tale. He was a Dead Head after all and had traveled all over the country following that band. There was a deli below my sister's place and he bought me a sub and a pitcher of beer. I flipped through the pages of the City Paper while I told him my ordeal and that's when I noticed an ad for the Descendents playing that night at the now legendary punk rock dump the Marble Bar.
"You know what would make this day even crazier?" I said to him. "If I went to this show."
No doubt he could relate. So he promised me he would drop me off there. My sister was planning on going to Mexico for her law school spring break the next day so she asked I not come home real late. Her boyfriend also volunteered to drive me back home the next day to get to my brother's bachelor party.
So he dropped me off and there I was sitting at a punk club about to watch one of my favorite bands when all of the sudden these skater kids I knew from Salisbury show up. They had driven up from school to see the show and we going to drive back afterwards. People did shit like this for punk rock back then.
When the show was over I asked the skater kids if they could give me ride up the road to my sister's and they said sure but on the way we past Loyola and feeling like I wanted to continue down this Kerouacian road to nowhere that I was on, I had them stop and let me out there. One of my best friends from high school went to Loyola and I knew he'd hook me up with a place to stay so I ran up the hill to campus and made a bee line for his dorm.
But the dorm door wouldn't open.
And the place was like a ghost town.
I asked a security guard what was going on and he said, "spring break."
Fuck me.
At this point, it was too late to call my sister so I did what I had done all day: I walked.
I walked for hours and miles before finding my way to my sister's place. The kicker was that it was just after 4am and she wasn't going to get up until 6am. So I attempted to sleep on a bus stop bench, then made my way into the alley behind her building and propped myself up against the wall. I didn't really sleep much so I decided I'd go back to the bench - at least from there I could see a clock on a building - a clock I would watch until I saw the light come on from my sister's room.
I waited about a half hour before I buzzed her to let me in, then immediately passed out on her couch.
After my mid-morning nap, because that's really what it was, I got my ride home and by night's end was at some house with a bunch of dudes watching blue movies and drinking beer. At some point we made our way into DC to go to a strip bar.
I have no idea how I got back to school.
I think my oldest brother Jimmy gave me a ride back...
I just came home from working a Sunday evening catering shift.
Exhausted from losing my lake virginity the day before, where I drank bastardized versions of Wild Orchids, rode jet skis and made a very feeble attempt to water ski (note to self: close mouth and let go of rope), I soldiered through a shit ass'ed catering shift.
My shift involved setting up for some extreme German baptism party only to have a storm roll in and have to move slash lift eight foot tables (with place settings) from the backyard to their wrap-around porch.
Suddenly I remembered a recent late night informercial on Dean Martin's variety show.
I had just labored through trying to finished the Nick Tosches biography on Dino before my recent trip to the Jersey Shore.
I never made it to the finish before it was due at the place where one of my friends works. I didn't want to return it all full of sand and stained with suntan lotion. Plus it's one of those dense as fuck books that would demand more attention that I could possibly give at this juncture in time, so I pledge to myself I would purchase a copy and return to it when I could better digest the Crocetti family lore.
Here's a clip from informercial I recently saw and what I think comedy is all about.
He's four years older than me but we shared a room growing up so we sometimes act like twins.
Even though he lives in Pennsylvania and I live in North Carolina, we pretty much talk just about every other day.
He's probably one of the funniest guys I know.
I can't recall a family get-together where we weren't cracking each other up for reasons that would seem unexplainable to everyone else in the room. And we usually get the spousal lectures before family visits that include the caveat: "you and your brother better behave yourselves...'
He is a simple guy with simple needs: he gave up wearing underwear years ago when his waistline no longer fit into them and he deducted shortly thereafter that one doesn't really need to use underwear. It was his first philosophical breakthrough regarding consumerism.
He also told me once how he doesn't like that feeling of being wet after he takes a shower and often blow dries himself with a hairdryer.
Back in the day, he was like Richie: he taught me how to sneak out of the house and the proper way to egg cars and was sort of a hoodlum in junior high but by the time he got into high school he was too consumed with sports and girls and didn't have much to do with me.
The whole dynamic really took a turn when he went to college.
That's when suddenly it became my job to go retrieve him when his semesters ended at West Chester. The drive was about three and a half hours from home which made it more encouraging to get there, sleep over, and come home the next day. Picking your older brother up from school was a cool thing so I often enlisted the help of my friends to ride shotgun.
One time it was me and my friend Kevin. We had arrived early and neither my brother nor his roommate Jerry had come home from school yet so a guy who lived below them offer to let us stay with him until my brother came back from his last class. It was everything off-campus housing should be: cassette tapes everywhere, empty beer cans littering the coffee table and the rank smell of pot in the air.
When my brother came home we asked him if he'd buy us some beer. So he went out and got us a six-pack of Genesee Cream Ale. After playing a few rounds of darts with my brother and Jerry, Kevin and I decided we wanted to venture out and see the campus. We walked down the three flights of stairs and made the trek to High Street. It was night time and most of the campus had already started to shut down for break so - dejected - Kevin and I made our way back to my brother's crib. When we reached the third floor and the door of his apartment, the hall light was out which made it pitch black and rendered us blind. We had to feel our way with the key to the doorknob only we had no idea which key it was which made our efforts even more of a challenge.
At some point I guess I was trying to line up a key to the hole with Kevin standing right over my shoulder squinting in the exact same position as me, when we suddenly heard the click and the door opened. But the key was stuck in the handle. I yanked it out and ended up butting my elbow into Kevin's nose which quickly exploded with blood. By the time we got to the top of the steps inside blood was everywhere. When my brother saw Kevin's face he jumped up and hollered, "Jesus Christ what happened?" Much to my dismay, Kevin uttered, "Somebody sucker punched me."
"What!!??" screamed my brother. "Where? Who? " he said. Then he turned to his sleeping roommate and said, "Jerry get the fuck up. Someone tagged Greg's friend in the face."
Now Jerry was a Marine who took up boxing and could lick any body's ass in two quick seconds.
"Where is the guy?"
It was then that Kevin realized the seriousness of the situation and 'fessed up that it was a joke and that I had bashed his nose with my elbow.
But it also was one of those defining moments when you realize that despite what differences you might have or the beefs you got into as kids your brother had your back: that he would kick some body's ass for kicking yours without question.
Of course, neither of us have ever had to ante up on that, I mean we're Italian - we are as they say, "lovers not fighters."
So this year I was super excited to be able to vacation with my brother and his family. It had been almost 15 years since my brother and I got to hang out at the shore with one another. So in honor of that, I reprised a look I had 20 years before and went and bleached my hair for the occasion.
This time around, only one person managed to come up with a witty Billy Idol jab...
