Biloxxxi's Woodshed

On Saturday, it was time for me to make my triumphant return to the city of my Alma Mater, Milledgeville, GA. It’s a small town and is home to what was once the world’s largest insane asylum, Central State Hospital. That is one creepy place. There’s still a mental hospital there, but now it’s also home to five prisons. I didn’t attend any of those fine liberal arts facilities, instead I went the safe route and enrolled at Georgia College & State University (Hail o beacon bright).

Anyway, I was heading to Milledgeville for an engagement party for one of my old bandmates in Idle Yeti. Before all that though, I had to decide on a method of transportation. My intentions were to ride my Harley-Davidson. Most of the trip is spent on back highways and you can pretty much just roll along unencumbered. However, as I got ready to leave Atlanta, it looked as if it might rain, and there’s not much worse than riding a motorcycle in the rain. So I filled El Chup up with $50 worth of gas and bumbled and stumbled my way on down to Milli-vegas. It might seem like a trivial decision, but in my world, no decision is ever trivial.

After managing to stretch what should have been a 1.5 hour trip into 2.5 hours, simply because El Chup cannot be persuaded to travel faster than 65 mph, I arrived at the party. We sat around and shot the shit, catching up and whatnot, nothing too exciting. My buddy Grizzle makes some mean homebrew beer so he brought a keg of hefeweizen which kept the conversational gears a-turning. After skewing some wings on the barbee and playing a few dozen games of washers (or Yankee Bastard Horsehoes as Bill calls them), it was bar time.

I used to work at a bar in downtown Milledgeville called Buffington’s back when I was a lesser legend. I worked in the kitchen and bartended, which is where I got to know all of Milledgeville. The guy that hired me and was featured on Idle Yeti’s album cover as the greatest bartender ever, Andy, just returned as the manager, so I was stoked to hang out with him again. We rolled in, and lo and behold, it’s just like I never left. The same old people working and drinking the same old things. Except for me. I’ve graduated from High Life and Jaeger to Cap’n and Coke and Goldschlager. See there? Moved to Atlanta and got me some culturin (High Life is still my beer of choice though).

As the last call crept in on us, Andy told me to stick around and we’d have a couple after-hours beers for old times sake. So me and this dude Jeff who we used to hang out with hung around while Andy did his closing up shit. There were a few other folks there until the waitresses left, after that it was just us three. Me and Jeff got hungry while Andy was totaling everything up, so we decided to make ourselves a sandwich in the meantime. The following is an exercept from our drunken sandwich making conversation:

Jeff: “Dude, what kind of sandwich do you want?”
Me: “What’re our options?”
Jeff: “Well, I found the bread. We got some swiss here…”
Me: “Yeah, I like me some swiss…”
Jeff: “I think this is turkey. That’ll be good. Oh and here’s some leftover bacon.”
Me: “Mmmm. Bacon.”
Jeff: “Damn! I think this is hummus spread. How about some of that?”
Me: “Buffington’s has hummus? Sounds good to me.”
Jeff: “Cool. We better make one for Andy too.”

We toasted the bread and made our little sandwiches and wandered down to the office to take Andy his. “Jeffe (we called him Jeffe because he kinda looks like Jesus, and as everyone knows, Jesus = Boss), this hummus kinda tastes like immitation crab meat,” I said. He replied, “Nah, tastes fine to me.”

Andy's the bartender. I'm the one in the red.

“Hey Andy, we made you a sandwich,” Jeff said as we sat down. “Oh yeah?” Andy replied as he inspected it. “Yep. We even put some hummus on it.” Jeff responded. “We don’t have hummus, Jeff. This is crab spread and you’re suppsed to heat it up first.” Andy said “Dammit Jeff!” I exclaimed as the sandwich in my mouth slowly congealed. More goldschlager was necessary to wash this nastiness down.

My intention for the evening had been to sleep on the couch over at Grizzle’s girlfriend’s place a couple of blocks away. She drew me a map and I was supposed to call when I got there and they’d let me in. My cellphone was running low on juice, so I switched it off when we got to the bar. As I wandered towards her house the sheer amount of Goldschlager that I’d consumed in the last few hours began to set in. “Sweet Jesus, I am drunk.” I said to myself as I stepped up on her porch.

I cut my cellphone on and immediately it said, “battery low, powering down.” Freakin awesome. I sat down on the steps for a moment to collect my thoughts. I knew I was at the right house, but it was a duplex with more than one door on the porch. I took my chances and knocked lightly on the one I thought was hers. Nobody answered.

“Shit.” I thought to myself as I sat back down on the porch steps. I was drunk, it was kinda chilly and I was only wearing sandals, and I had no place to sleep. Naturally my most coherent thought was, “I’m gonna have one hell of a headache in the morning, I better find some water to wash down this Goody’s (headache powder) with.” I hopped up thinking I was gonna walk over to the gas station and get some Combos and a Gatorade when an idea occured to me. The garden hose.

I look around the side of the house and there was a spigot sticking out of the ground. There was no hose, but I could make it work. I squatted down by the spigot and got a mouthful of water and dumped the Goody’s in my mouth. About the time I get ready to rinse my mouth, I look up and there is a Milledgeville Police Officer creeping slowly by, staring at me. “Please God, just keep on going. I have no decent excuse and I have nowhere to go.” I thought to myself and thankfully he did. Somebody give that man a medal.

It was probably 4:00 AM by this point so I just decided I’d sleep on the porch till the sun came up. That lasted about all of a half hour until I realized I was freezing. There was nothing to cover up with, I couldn’t call anyone on my phone, and I didn’t know anyone’s number to call using the payphone. One option left; walk several blocks and sleep in my truck.

I woke up a few hours later with my feet wrapped up in a Keny Rogers t-shirt and one hell of a crick in my neck, and for some odd reason I’d decided I needed to sleep with my aviators on. I woke my happy ass up and made the drive back to the ATL, tired, stiff, but sans headache. Little did I know when I’d put $50 worth of Chavez’s Finest in that bad boy the day before, I was also paying for my accomodations for the evening.

In my last post, we delved into the deep dark abyss that is my dating life.  Today we’ll continue to poke at the soft underbelly of the beast with a broom stick and discuss one of my more traumatic experiences, the most awkward first kiss ever.

As I mentioned before, my high school didn’t have many dateable girls, so the pickings were slim. I’m sort of a unique character (as if you couldn’t tell) and high school isn’t always kind to individuals. I did well enough, I suppose. I got dates for all the major dances and even managed to get a girl for my arm on Saturday nights here and there, but nothing worth mentioning. I did get drug through the mud for about a month prior to Senior Prom by a cheerleader, but I learned a lesson on that I’ll never forget.

Anyway, I made it to college, and I was good at that. There was room for individuals in college. I started playing in a band and was having a blast. Near the start of my second year, I was at a party at Wiley and Deuce’s apartment and I met this girl Angela. She was a tiny little thing, and even though we were trashed, she had this smile that just sucked me in. I didn’t ask her out that night, but she invited me to her lake house the next day. I declined, because we were so drunk that I didn’t think she’d remember the next day and then I’d just look like a jackass.

A week or two later, I was over at Roman’s dorm and I knew that Angela lived in the same building. So, I wandered around her floor until I found her room. This may seem creeper-ish, but at our school, everyone in the dorms had a dry erase board on the door so you could leave them messages. This was very similar to the Facebook wall nowdays. If someone told you where they lived, you were free to go write on their door, just like you’re free to add them on Facebook. I wrote a little note on her door saying I enjoyed meeting her and I hoped to hang out with her again. No big deal.

I didn’t see her again and I’d sorta forgotten about the whole thing until one night I was over at Deuce’s place for his birthday and Angela and her friend had baked him a birthday cake. They brought it over and we all ended up drinkin and having a good time. The evening wore on and her and I ended up all hugged up on the couch. No wallowing around or nothing, just big spoon/little spoon. I wasn’t gonna miss the opportunity this time, so I asked her out in the morning. She agreed.

Our first date was pretty uneventful, just dinner at Applebee’s (the finest eating establishment in Milledgeville at the time) and then to the bar with some friends for Tuesday night karaoke (a Terrell Tigers tradition). Because I completely lacked testicular fortitude, I did not kiss her that evening even after I walked her home. I did get another date out of the deal, however.

Our second date was dinner and a trip to the fair with Deuce and his ladyfriend at the time. It went pretty well and she and I wound up at my apartment watching a movie (The Quick and The Dead, if I recall correctly). We were laying on the couch and her head was resting against my jaw. It was at this moment that I sacked up and decided that I better kiss this girl.

It’s at this juncture that we should rewind back to my freshman year of college. I was playing football with a bunch of guys from my dorm and I’d just made a rather spectacular catch. As I was racing for the endzone, there was one guy in front of me and I tried to lower my shoulder to knock him out of the way. At the same moment, he leaned in to tackle me, driving the top of his head into the jaw bone on the right side of my face. Instantly I felt this searing pain and my jaw was all crooked. I couldn’t hardly open my mouth and I couldn’t explain to everyone why I was writhing in pain on the ground. I smacked the opposite jaw bone and my jaw cracked back into place. I wandered back to the dorms and spent the next three days holding an ice pack to my swollen face and eating nothing but jello.

Ok, back to the couch with Angela. We’ve been lying there for about half an hour with her head resting on my jaw. For a year or two after that football injury if I laid a certain way with my face resting on the pillow, my jaw would pop out of socket. It didn’t really hurt, it was just this thing and I’d have to kinda smack it back in. Well Angela’s head had been resting ever so gently on my jaw for the last half hour, and guess what? That thing popped out of socket. Actually, it slid out of socket real sneaky so I didn’t notice. I turned over to kiss Angela and as our mouths met for the first time I realized, “Shit! My jaw is out of socket!”

It was terrible. This was the most embarassment I’d ever felt. I could only open my mouth about half an inch and to her, I’m sure it seemed like she was making out with a stroke victim. If this happened now, I’d just have smacked it back into place and laughed it off, but back then I was scared to death. Here I was with a girl that I really liked, trying to make out, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why God hated me so much.

Thankfully, the make out session was short lived (not what I wanted, but what I needed). We ended up passing out on the couch and when I took her back to her dorm the next morning, I successfully kissed her, mildly redeeming myself.

A few weeks later, we were nearing what you might call a relationship, and were on a road trip to Orlando with another of her friends. On the ride home, we got to telling embarassing stories. I told this one and I’d like to think that’s what sealed the deal for me. Unlike many of my dating stories, this one has a mostly happy ending. I ended up dating Angela for 3 years. Don’t ask me what went wrong, I just woke up one day and the sun no longer rose in the east

Dating (go ahead and sigh). The bane of the existence of the twenty-something single male. I am notoriously bad at dating. I have a tendency to run into things with reckless abandon, completely opposite of the typical guy, who is afraid of commitment. It’s not that I don’t think things out. It’s just that I know it’s nothing a little Jack Daniels and some Randy Travis on the record player won’t fix. In fact, I can often be found on Sunday mornings out in the front yard in my bathing suit and bath robe cleaning up the emotional wreckage from the train wreck that is my dating life. It’s not a completely terrible way of doing things, it just means I spend a lot of money at the bar recovering. I’ve fumbled and stumbled my way into a few relationships that were worth a damn, but the successes aren’t nearly as funny as the failures. Today’s story: my first date ever.

For some odd reason, I’ve always somehow managed to get dates with girls that are really attractive. I still have no idea how I do that. I’m skinny and my fashion sense consists of having no fashion at all. I’m the complete antithesis of anything you’d see in Men’s Health or GQ (perhaps I just answered my own question). This doesn’t shock me quite as much now, because as you get older women start to acquire more sense. But anyway, I was a sophomore in high school and I’d just gotten my license. To me, this meant it was time to try out this dating thing. I had a job, I had money, I had a damn fine head of hair, and I had an El Camino. There were seriously only about 8 girls that you could possibly date at my high school, so I took my wares elsewhere.

I had a couple of friends that went to a big high school, Parkview, in the next county. I started hanging out with them some and one night at a little party, I met this girl named Jenny. She was fine little thing, a soccer player, and we talked for a couple of minutes. I really didn’t get to know her very well, but before she left I asked her if she wanted to go out the next week. She said yes. That part was good. Probably the easiest time I ever had asking a girl out, but then again, I had no idea how horribly bad these things could turn out.

I called her up the next week and we set something up for the following Saturday night. When Saturday arrived, I dressed like I had some sense in jeans with a button up shirt. Not too shabby. I drove over to her house to pick her up and I had to go meet her parents. I was ill-prepared for that. Her Dad was a big sumbitch, and he had a real intimidating way of talking, like a football coach or drill instructor. This was my very first rodeo and when he asked me what my intentions were with his daughter, I suppose I said “uhhhh” a bit too long before responding with “Nothing Sir, I’d just like to get to know her.” That man chilled my soul with that glare. I still curl up in the fetal position and cry a bit late at night because of it.

Somehow, by the grace of God, he let me take her out. We went to a restaurant over near her house and much to my chagrin, it was a vegetarian joint. You gotta understand, that at this point in my life I ate NO vegetables other than black eyed peas. None. I HATED them. I’ve learned to like quite a few in the years since, mostly because of this experience. She ordered and I followed with the most tolerable thing I could find on the menu. I can’t remember what it was now, but it was equivalent to not good.

We conversed a bit about common friends and such. Then about sports we played. It started off well enough, but after a piece she noticed that I’d only managed to choke down about 3 bites of my meal. I could see the disdain in her eyes. She didn’t say anything, but even at that early age, I knew I was on the ropes late in the match. In retrospect I should have just said I didn’t feel well and all probably would have been forgiven, but instead I just came across as “uncultured.” At 16. Can you believe that?

After dinner we had planned to go see a movie. Since I knew nothing at all about dating, I agreed to a chick flick. The occular rape-age that is Stepmom. Susan Sarandon and Julia Roberts in the same movie? Are you f’n kidding me? I would have been happier with a good gum scraping. On the way to the theater, she started complaining about the lack of A/C in the Hell Camino (to those of you who knew the Camino in more recent years, it was pretty rough when I first got it). I knew this was going bad, but I didn’t have the sense to just drive her home and cut my losses. Besides, she was hot. That’s one thing that hasn’t changed over the years; I’ll still take a shotgun blast to the side of the face from a hot girl.

Go ahead, shoot me right square in the face.

We made it to the movie theater (oddly enough, the same one I shat my pants in) and got our tickets. I took this opportunity to hook myself up with some nachos since I was starving and I bought her a drink and some popcorn. We found some seats in the nearly empty theater and the idea crossed my mind that I might need to make a move. I’d never kissed a girl before, let alone tried make a move. This had recipe for disaster written all over it. I worked up some courage and the idea that I’d try to just hold her hand first. I slid my hand down from the armrest to where her hand was, she pulled it away. It could have just been coincidence, but that was enough for me. I tried to play it off and put my arm back on the armrest to retreat and regroup and plot my next move. I soon lost track of what was even going on in the movie and drifted off to sleep (to this day, I’ve never fallen asleep in another movie).

I woke up sometime later and the lights were on and the credits were rolling. I looked to my left and Jenny wasn’t there. “Oh shit!” I muttered to myself. I stood up and hurried back to the lobby. I didn’t see her anywhere so I waited by the restrooms for a minute or two thinking maybe she’d gone in there. She didn’t come out so I walked out to my car and there she was, sitting on the tailgate of my El Camino. “I think you should take me home.” She said. “Yeah, I, uh, guess you’re right,” I replied, rather sheepishly. I felt bad. Really bad. She stared out the window the entire ride home and I’m pretty sure that if we’d have had cellphones at the time she would have been making the shit out of some textbabies the whole way.

I dropped her off at her house and she got out and simply said “Thanks.” Her Dad was sitting on the front porch and he waved as I pulled off. Had I been older, I’d have just drowned my sorrows in some alcohol and laughed it off. But when you’re 16 and it’s your first date, you take failure hard. Oh yeah, and top that milkshake off with the scathing phone call I got the next day from my friend Bridgett who introduced us and vouched for me.