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The First Payoff

The story of the key fob goes back to the day I hit Greg up for info on who made the phone call. He had heard Snowplow talking about it on the smoke bench outside class with two other hillbilly Nascar boys. Greg was waiting for his roommate and Snowplow’s voice was carrying, distinctly saying my last name. Greg knew me from the hall meeting on the first night and my name had been passed around the floor as a possible source for alcohol.

I asked him why the guy’s name was Snowplow. Greg said his roommate was from the same hometown and the kid’s father and uncle owned a snow removal business and he was in line to inherit the empire when they both died. The key fob was what Snowplow used as his business card, showing it to everyone as his proof that the riches of snow removal were within his grasp, brandishing it like a papal seal.

Mark and I took the picture and the key fob to Snowplow the following Monday night. We found him in his room dressed in Ohio State boxer shorts with the waistband hidden from a hanging hairy gut. His roommate was sitting at his desk with his back turned, paying us no mind. We handed the picture to him first, his face stretching in a smile which fell away like an Etch a Sketch in his skull was being shaken. He looked back at us, obviously seeking his proof. Mark opened his right fist, revealing the fob which was scratched up, something Mark and I had done back in Columbus with the thought that it would look like it had been through a scuffle.

Snowplow took the fob slowly from Mark’s hand, like it was some holy relic.  At that moment, I actually felt sorry for the kid. How pathetic, to worship a rubber key chain, his whole life was defined by a red rubber fob, and we were giving a little pride back to him, pride we had taken away in the first place, a pride that had no honor to back it up. If I had any reservations about lying to and manipulating this peanut head, it was all washed away with that look of worship on his face as he took that fob out of Mark’s hand. I looked over at the phone sitting on his roommate’s desk, the same phone the douche bag had probably used to speak that filthy fucking word to me. He could drown in his own vomit for all I cared. We left without saying another word.

The Simmer Down

Mark and I resolved, after the whole Snowplow affair, that we’d cool it for a while and concentrate on school. We had been high consistently every day since the Saturday we arrived and it was getting to the point when being sober was just like being stoned again. Feeling high when you stop doing drugs is a hell of a thing, a final flag before things start sliding downhill fast.

I was going for an Astronomy minor because I loved space, astrophysics, cosmology, all that shit. The only problem was it was an 8:30 class. I had a great piece of ass that sat next to me and by the second week we’d already struck up a Hi/Hi relationship. By the fourth week, she was driving me to class and I was dumb enough to think she wanted more than my notes and I gave them to her of course because I wanted to fuck her. That never panned out and the last I heard she was slinging drinks in some dive near the flats in Cleveland. That class was on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Right after that, I had a 9:30 Imaginative Writing class taught by this girl who meant well but was so timid in her teaching style that she couldn’t contain my overly massive ego from running a whirlwind around the class. It got to a point where I would do things to initiate a response from her. One exercise in class was for everyone to draw an occupation and an action from a hat. The occupation would be the protagonist’s job in a short story and the action would be the image my story ended on. I drew a hairdresser as my occupation and the ending action was licking a lamppost in the middle of winter.

The story I wrote was about this hairdresser who wakes up to go to her salon, run by a real douche bag who sexually harasses her and gambles away all his money. She opens the shop every day and her life is miserable but this day she’s not alone when she opens up. There’s a finger breaker there from the loan shark the douche bag boss borrowed money from and hasn’t paid back. He gives her a chloroform mask and she wakes up strapped to the hair chair.

This finger breaker has a German Sheppard named Adolph. Since the hairdresser doesn’t know where the boss is, the breaker decides to torture her for amusement. He strips her naked from the waist down and shoves peanut butter in her crack and sicks his dog on her. She can’t scream, can’t move, and just as the dog is finishing up the boss comes in and then turns and runs out the door when he sees what’s going on. The finger breaker catches up to the boss, right next to a phone pole (in the middle of Winter). He grabs the douche bag’s face with his thumb and middle finger, forcing the guy’s tongue to pop out of his mouth, a pushes his face into the pole, the guy is stuck to the pole by his tongue.  He takes a gun out and shoots the boss in the foot, steals his wallet, and walks down the street with Adolph following. The douche bag boss is stuck to the pole with a bleeding foot and the poor hairdresser has finally resolved to find a new job in a better part of town. I caught a little bit of heat over that story. The teacher asked me to stay after and talk with her a moment. I obliged and when she questioned me on my motive for writing it, I just told her I had a feeling and went with it. She ended up giving me a B-.

Mark and Phil were struggling in their classes. With all the women, liquor, and pot in Mark’s case, they were having a hard time staying focused. I did my best to compound the problem by asking Mark to get high as often as I could. The majority of my writing that year was done under the influence of marijuana. Looking back at my writing during that time, I find a body of ideals never quite thought through, each caged in a haze of doped up euphemisms that only served to damage some decent ideas. And that gorgeous little herb did more than affect my writing. I was estranged from my family, had been for years, because I thought they didn’t understand me.

Then one day the following summer, after Mark had died, my mom caught me smoking a bowl on her back deck around midnight on a Tuesday. She said to me listen, you think I don’t know what you’re going through, but I do. Don’t forget, I lived through the sixties. The point hit home and I welcomed my mother back in my life. A hard shave was coming but for the time being, Mark and I were living the high life. The Magistrates official business had been put on the back burner for the time being and we were filling the minutes of our days with bong hits, blunts, and the crate of VHS stoner movies I brought with me.

Life is always sweet in the early moments of a memory.

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