PART I: BREADSTICKS AND AUTOGRAPHS
It’s 2 AM Saturday morning. I just now realize that I need a cooler for the weekend. Though I wanted to go to bed early, I have no other choice but to run to Wal-Mart and pick a cheap one up. Just as I’m about to get in my car I see a cooler sitting on the neighbor’s deck. Though I would ordinarily ask for permission, it’s late and I am too tired and too desperate. I take the cooler and quickly bring it inside to fill it with the necessary supplies.
Seven hours later Adam and Eric are at my back door. We drive to Galesburg to get Margaret. The trip is officially underway.
We stop in Champaign to grab a bite. Our first meal together will be at the family favorite Fazoli's. I am excited, as history has shown me nothing but good times at this fine establishment. We order, sit down, and no sooner than we do does Chad, the breadstick guy, start to make his rounds.
Chad is an odd sort. He has the body of a man who is 25, the face of a boy who is 13 and the disposition of a girl no older than 8. I ask for one breadstick. This seems to disappoint Chad who asks why I only want one. He asks if my stomach is only ‘this big’ as he holds out his fist to indicate just how big ‘this big’ is. I tell Chad not to get sassy with me and he skips off.
As we leave, everyone realizes they could still go for another breadstick. We see Chad walk by and ask if he’ll bring us some. Chad explains that breadsticks can only be given to seated customers. Our expressions of disappointment must have tugged at Chad’s little heartstrings because a minute later Chad comes back out and sneaks us a buddle of breadsticks he wrapped for us in the back. He quickly makes the handoff to Eric and runs off giggling.
We get to the hotel and check in. The hotel is not as nice as it looked on the internet and though this is somewhat upsetting at first, we soon find this will only work to our advantage. Perk number one of staying in a trashy hotel – no one else will. Our lack of neighbors will prove to be valuable in the hours to come.
After walking around the town for a bit, we head to the concert. The opening act was unbearable. A poster girl for the ‘anyone-who-knows-a-few-open-chords-and-a-song-about-heartbreak-can-be-a-rock-s tar’ movement, she was unimpressive to say the least. Yet her fatal flaw was in her arrogance.
“I may just stay up here and play for you all night, Ben won’t mind”
A heckler shouts, “we will”.
The four of us explode with laughter.
During a lull in her set, we hear a man a few rows back from us say she is “black and sassy”.
Once again, the four of us cackle in delight of the audiences’ collective contempt for this woman and her guitar.
Now I understand that the opening act has it rough. They are synonymous with who people didn’t pay to see. Ergo, they are the only obstacle keeping the audience from seeing who will get the lion’s share of the ticket price. The few times I have played for audiences I have had the good luck of a polite, attentive audience. I appreciate that, don’t get me wrong. But where she went wrong was in taking her attentive audience for granted. The moment you start talking about your belt and how much your pants were is the moment I laugh uproariously when the guy behind me calls you ‘black and sassy’.
Ben Folds was fantastic as always. There’s no point in me going into it. After the concert Adam was dead set on meeting the man. It’s rainy, it’s windy, it’s cold. The last thing any of us want to do is prolong our stay outside any more than we have to. But Adam really wanted to meet him, and seeing as we didn’t wait for him at the last show, and seeing as Adam drove, and seeing as his face was wet enough and the sight of tears would just be unbearable, the three of us agreed to stay.
It’s been said that sadness is the key that lets our tears out of eye jail. I guess the best way I can put it is I didn’t want to be the man who provided the key.
So we stay. And we wait. And it continued to rain, and it continued to be cold. Eric was getting irritable and tells Adam that the second Ben comes out he was going to stab him to death so we could leave.
Of the dozen or so of us that braved the elements and waited, one was a guy who went into great detail telling his friends a story about how he pulled something out of his ass. This included Ben’s cake, which we saw the tour manager bring out earlier.
Adam tried to give a handful of change to the tour manager in an attempt to garner a backstage pass. Perhaps a more experienced shopper could’ve made more use of the $1.65, but the tour manager passed.
Then it happened. Adam’s eyes light up with joy as Ben Folds comes out the backstage door. We meet him, talk to him, I kiss him. Adam has him sign some EPs and we all shake his hand. Some guy hands me his camera and asks if I will take his picture with Ben. I do so. I then take out my camera, and as Mr. Folds prepares for another photo-op I hand it to him and ask, “actually, could you take a picture of me and my friends?” He laughed and obliged.
We were wet, and we were cold. But in the end we were that with a picture of us and Ben Folds, and a picture of us taken by the man himself. Adam emerged the hero, if only for a short while.
PART II: KIWI MAD DOG 20/20 AND HANG GLIDING
A quick disclaimer before I move on. Anyone who knows me well knows I despise 99% of all “drinking stories”. I find them immature, puerile, and most importantly, rarely entertaining. Unless something of particular interest happens (i.e. breaking a wine bottle on the curb in response to the plebian cinematic taste of a girl you are trying to impress) I simply don’t care. What is to follow is probably a mixture of the two. Nothing of particular interest to someone who wasn’t there, but a rather decent anecdote for those who were.
That said, after the concert we went back to the hotel room and spent the night getting pie-eyed. I say this not in the “oh, isn’t it cool that I drank a lot” way, but more in the “you need to know for the rest of the story”. So, with cavalier disregard for cliché, the four of us spent the night getting stewed and having what was quite frankly one of the best times I’ve had in awhile.
Adam, being the only sober one, took us to the grocery store to get something to eat. Hyjinx ensued. Back at the hotel, we moved all the furniture not bolted down outside and made a porch. It was not until the next morning that we realized we forgot to bring it in. The night wore on as Margaret mixed a little of every bottle we had into a styrofoam cup. Everyone taking a drink as a sign of our comrodery, somehow Margaret was the only one who went back for more.
Realizing we were getting a bit out of hand, Eric and I tried to sober up by giving a dissertation on sandwiches. Needless to say, we did not offer the seriousness that such a topic requires.
Our state of logical thinking long gone, Margaret had Eric and I convinced of everything from her being a Communist studies major to the fact that she sold her virginity on eBay and had sex with the guy in the back of his car.
Like the alcoholic father I never had, Adam quietly poured himself drinks while watching ESPN as Margaret, Eric and I rolled around on the bed while discussing the theological merits of Nietzsche and Shang Tsung. As pointed out by Margaret, things are of whack when Adam is the responsible one. This being said about a man who was last seen under a bed and in the drawer of a cabinet. But eventually it got the best of him and Adam became obscenely blunt with comments about his sexual frustrations.
In an innocuous, sheepish voice, “Margaret, will you make out with me?”
We slow danced with Margaret to music that wasn’t there. Eric swam on the carpet then put a blanket on his head proclaiming he was Mary Magdalene of the Bee People. We played rounds upon rounds of card games making up the rules as we went. A good time was had indeed.
Time to lay our sleepy, drunky heads to rest, we climbed into bed. However, proper sleeping arraignments could not be finalized for forty-five minutes. Such arraignments varied from two to a bed, to four to a bed, to three in one bed one on the floor. We finally settled on Adam in one bed, Margaret and I sharing another (separated by what we dubbed “the chastity blanket”), and Eric in the shower. It was then that he had his spiritual shower experience, swearing up and down the guy three rooms down was talking to him.
The next morning, in a more temperate state-of-mind, we get back in the car and head to Indianapolis. Staying true to his form of master navigator, Adam gave us a tour of a city he hadn’t been to in years. From the building where David Letterman got his start, to the apartment his dad lived in twenty-five years ago, we saw it all.
We go to the mall and get a bite to eat. Every establishment has a lady handing out free samples in the front. Trying them all, Eric and I decide ‘Gordon’s Gyros” was the place to dine simply because “the price is right”. Feeling that I offended the oriental lady from “Asian Chow” in saying this, I won back her affection telling her, “Your meat is very good.”
From the food court, I spotted an arcade on the next level. Good times were an escalator ride away. Anyone who has gone to an arcade in the past five years or so knows there are only two games, each with a multitude of variations. You can either: shoot things, or race a car. After trying the NASCAR simulator, we moved on to see what else was out there.
Eric and I shot at dinosaurs. Margaret and I shot sharks. Adam and Margaret shot fires. But the dinosaurs soon killed us, the sharks reclaimed the treasure, and the building eventually burned down. Perhaps this was not our calling.
We explored some more and turning a corner, found a whole new variation of games (though strikingly similar to the racing genre). This new category being the skateboarding/waterskiing/snowboarding/skiing simulators. But the greatest game ever, one in a category all to its own: Hang gliding games.
Before I go on, picture what a hang glider looks like. Peaceful, serene. . . beautiful. Now realize that the skydiver in your mind is soaring hundreds of feet in the sky, probably over a canyon, maybe even a waterfall. They are not, however, crouched over a metal bar, knees on the ground in some arcade in a mall. That said, imagine a goofy, awkward kid kneeled down on the floor vainly trying to figure out how to hold on to the safety bar.
We leave the mall and get back on the road. Headed to Macomb via Galesburg via Champaign, we stop at U of I so Eric can see his lady friend Crystal. We go to her dorm and tell her about the weekend. Letting Eric and Crystal catch up, I grab a marker off someone’s dry-erase board and go down the hall, door to door, writing messages on every one:
Sandy, you have my toothbrush.
Lisa, thanks for letting me use your dog collar.
Elizabeth, I need my notebook back. Call me.
Julia, you stole my milk.
Ashley, I have your shoes.
We parted with Crystal and went to see my old pal Josh. The Fellini ying to my Spielberg yang, Josh is one of the few people who understands why I bought a new DVD cabinet simply because it bothered me that Annie Hall was on the same shelf as Taxi Driver.
After catching up and sharing stories about my father and his obsession with hand size, the five us, along with Josh’s marvelous girlfriend Meaghan, decide to get something to eat. Jimmy John’s, being on the ground floor of Josh’s apartment, was the obvious choice of dining. Enjoying delectable sandwiches and plenty of free smells, we spoke of days prior and the legends we have since become.
On the road once more, Margaret and I shared the joys of going to Catholic school and the perks that went along with it – most notably the joys of cotton balls with glued-on googly eyes and joining band only so you could get out of going to church in the morning. Arriving in Galesburg, we dropped Margaret off, said our goodbyes, and went on our way back home.
Forty hours later I was back where I started: in my kitchen, messenger bag around my shoulder, cooler at my side. Only then Adam hadn’t spent time under a bed, Eric’s spiritual experiences were at a minimum, Margaret had no notion of standing an hour in the rain and I had no idea so much fun could be had in such a short time.
Later that night, positive that no one was awake, I clean out the cooler and put it back on the neighbor’s porch from where it came. Along with a handpicked flower and a bottle of cheap wine I leave inside, was the simple note:
Thanks for the great weekend
That ill-fated night
It’s 2 AM Saturday morning. I just now realize that I need a cooler for the weekend. Though I wanted to go to bed early, I have no other choice but to run to Wal-Mart and pick a cheap one up. Just as I’m about to get in my car I see a cooler sitting on the neighbor’s deck. Though I would ordinarily ask for permission, it’s late and I am too tired and too desperate. I take the cooler and quickly bring it inside to fill it with the necessary supplies.
Seven hours later Adam and Eric are at my back door. We drive to Galesburg to get Margaret. The trip is officially underway.
We stop in Champaign to grab a bite. Our first meal together will be at the family favorite Fazoli's. I am excited, as history has shown me nothing but good times at this fine establishment. We order, sit down, and no sooner than we do does Chad, the breadstick guy, start to make his rounds.
Chad is an odd sort. He has the body of a man who is 25, the face of a boy who is 13 and the disposition of a girl no older than 8. I ask for one breadstick. This seems to disappoint Chad who asks why I only want one. He asks if my stomach is only ‘this big’ as he holds out his fist to indicate just how big ‘this big’ is. I tell Chad not to get sassy with me and he skips off.
As we leave, everyone realizes they could still go for another breadstick. We see Chad walk by and ask if he’ll bring us some. Chad explains that breadsticks can only be given to seated customers. Our expressions of disappointment must have tugged at Chad’s little heartstrings because a minute later Chad comes back out and sneaks us a buddle of breadsticks he wrapped for us in the back. He quickly makes the handoff to Eric and runs off giggling.
We get to the hotel and check in. The hotel is not as nice as it looked on the internet and though this is somewhat upsetting at first, we soon find this will only work to our advantage. Perk number one of staying in a trashy hotel – no one else will. Our lack of neighbors will prove to be valuable in the hours to come.
After walking around the town for a bit, we head to the concert. The opening act was unbearable. A poster girl for the ‘anyone-who-knows-a-few-open-chords-and-a-song-about-heartbreak-can-be-a-rock-s tar’ movement, she was unimpressive to say the least. Yet her fatal flaw was in her arrogance.
“I may just stay up here and play for you all night, Ben won’t mind”
A heckler shouts, “we will”.
The four of us explode with laughter.
During a lull in her set, we hear a man a few rows back from us say she is “black and sassy”.
Once again, the four of us cackle in delight of the audiences’ collective contempt for this woman and her guitar.
Now I understand that the opening act has it rough. They are synonymous with who people didn’t pay to see. Ergo, they are the only obstacle keeping the audience from seeing who will get the lion’s share of the ticket price. The few times I have played for audiences I have had the good luck of a polite, attentive audience. I appreciate that, don’t get me wrong. But where she went wrong was in taking her attentive audience for granted. The moment you start talking about your belt and how much your pants were is the moment I laugh uproariously when the guy behind me calls you ‘black and sassy’.
Ben Folds was fantastic as always. There’s no point in me going into it. After the concert Adam was dead set on meeting the man. It’s rainy, it’s windy, it’s cold. The last thing any of us want to do is prolong our stay outside any more than we have to. But Adam really wanted to meet him, and seeing as we didn’t wait for him at the last show, and seeing as Adam drove, and seeing as his face was wet enough and the sight of tears would just be unbearable, the three of us agreed to stay.
It’s been said that sadness is the key that lets our tears out of eye jail. I guess the best way I can put it is I didn’t want to be the man who provided the key.
So we stay. And we wait. And it continued to rain, and it continued to be cold. Eric was getting irritable and tells Adam that the second Ben comes out he was going to stab him to death so we could leave.
Of the dozen or so of us that braved the elements and waited, one was a guy who went into great detail telling his friends a story about how he pulled something out of his ass. This included Ben’s cake, which we saw the tour manager bring out earlier.
Adam tried to give a handful of change to the tour manager in an attempt to garner a backstage pass. Perhaps a more experienced shopper could’ve made more use of the $1.65, but the tour manager passed.
Then it happened. Adam’s eyes light up with joy as Ben Folds comes out the backstage door. We meet him, talk to him, I kiss him. Adam has him sign some EPs and we all shake his hand. Some guy hands me his camera and asks if I will take his picture with Ben. I do so. I then take out my camera, and as Mr. Folds prepares for another photo-op I hand it to him and ask, “actually, could you take a picture of me and my friends?” He laughed and obliged.
We were wet, and we were cold. But in the end we were that with a picture of us and Ben Folds, and a picture of us taken by the man himself. Adam emerged the hero, if only for a short while.
PART II: KIWI MAD DOG 20/20 AND HANG GLIDING
A quick disclaimer before I move on. Anyone who knows me well knows I despise 99% of all “drinking stories”. I find them immature, puerile, and most importantly, rarely entertaining. Unless something of particular interest happens (i.e. breaking a wine bottle on the curb in response to the plebian cinematic taste of a girl you are trying to impress) I simply don’t care. What is to follow is probably a mixture of the two. Nothing of particular interest to someone who wasn’t there, but a rather decent anecdote for those who were.
That said, after the concert we went back to the hotel room and spent the night getting pie-eyed. I say this not in the “oh, isn’t it cool that I drank a lot” way, but more in the “you need to know for the rest of the story”. So, with cavalier disregard for cliché, the four of us spent the night getting stewed and having what was quite frankly one of the best times I’ve had in awhile.
Adam, being the only sober one, took us to the grocery store to get something to eat. Hyjinx ensued. Back at the hotel, we moved all the furniture not bolted down outside and made a porch. It was not until the next morning that we realized we forgot to bring it in. The night wore on as Margaret mixed a little of every bottle we had into a styrofoam cup. Everyone taking a drink as a sign of our comrodery, somehow Margaret was the only one who went back for more.
Realizing we were getting a bit out of hand, Eric and I tried to sober up by giving a dissertation on sandwiches. Needless to say, we did not offer the seriousness that such a topic requires.
Our state of logical thinking long gone, Margaret had Eric and I convinced of everything from her being a Communist studies major to the fact that she sold her virginity on eBay and had sex with the guy in the back of his car.
Like the alcoholic father I never had, Adam quietly poured himself drinks while watching ESPN as Margaret, Eric and I rolled around on the bed while discussing the theological merits of Nietzsche and Shang Tsung. As pointed out by Margaret, things are of whack when Adam is the responsible one. This being said about a man who was last seen under a bed and in the drawer of a cabinet. But eventually it got the best of him and Adam became obscenely blunt with comments about his sexual frustrations.
In an innocuous, sheepish voice, “Margaret, will you make out with me?”
We slow danced with Margaret to music that wasn’t there. Eric swam on the carpet then put a blanket on his head proclaiming he was Mary Magdalene of the Bee People. We played rounds upon rounds of card games making up the rules as we went. A good time was had indeed.
Time to lay our sleepy, drunky heads to rest, we climbed into bed. However, proper sleeping arraignments could not be finalized for forty-five minutes. Such arraignments varied from two to a bed, to four to a bed, to three in one bed one on the floor. We finally settled on Adam in one bed, Margaret and I sharing another (separated by what we dubbed “the chastity blanket”), and Eric in the shower. It was then that he had his spiritual shower experience, swearing up and down the guy three rooms down was talking to him.
The next morning, in a more temperate state-of-mind, we get back in the car and head to Indianapolis. Staying true to his form of master navigator, Adam gave us a tour of a city he hadn’t been to in years. From the building where David Letterman got his start, to the apartment his dad lived in twenty-five years ago, we saw it all.
We go to the mall and get a bite to eat. Every establishment has a lady handing out free samples in the front. Trying them all, Eric and I decide ‘Gordon’s Gyros” was the place to dine simply because “the price is right”. Feeling that I offended the oriental lady from “Asian Chow” in saying this, I won back her affection telling her, “Your meat is very good.”
From the food court, I spotted an arcade on the next level. Good times were an escalator ride away. Anyone who has gone to an arcade in the past five years or so knows there are only two games, each with a multitude of variations. You can either: shoot things, or race a car. After trying the NASCAR simulator, we moved on to see what else was out there.
Eric and I shot at dinosaurs. Margaret and I shot sharks. Adam and Margaret shot fires. But the dinosaurs soon killed us, the sharks reclaimed the treasure, and the building eventually burned down. Perhaps this was not our calling.
We explored some more and turning a corner, found a whole new variation of games (though strikingly similar to the racing genre). This new category being the skateboarding/waterskiing/snowboarding/skiing simulators. But the greatest game ever, one in a category all to its own: Hang gliding games.
Before I go on, picture what a hang glider looks like. Peaceful, serene. . . beautiful. Now realize that the skydiver in your mind is soaring hundreds of feet in the sky, probably over a canyon, maybe even a waterfall. They are not, however, crouched over a metal bar, knees on the ground in some arcade in a mall. That said, imagine a goofy, awkward kid kneeled down on the floor vainly trying to figure out how to hold on to the safety bar.
We leave the mall and get back on the road. Headed to Macomb via Galesburg via Champaign, we stop at U of I so Eric can see his lady friend Crystal. We go to her dorm and tell her about the weekend. Letting Eric and Crystal catch up, I grab a marker off someone’s dry-erase board and go down the hall, door to door, writing messages on every one:
Sandy, you have my toothbrush.
Lisa, thanks for letting me use your dog collar.
Elizabeth, I need my notebook back. Call me.
Julia, you stole my milk.
Ashley, I have your shoes.
We parted with Crystal and went to see my old pal Josh. The Fellini ying to my Spielberg yang, Josh is one of the few people who understands why I bought a new DVD cabinet simply because it bothered me that Annie Hall was on the same shelf as Taxi Driver.
After catching up and sharing stories about my father and his obsession with hand size, the five us, along with Josh’s marvelous girlfriend Meaghan, decide to get something to eat. Jimmy John’s, being on the ground floor of Josh’s apartment, was the obvious choice of dining. Enjoying delectable sandwiches and plenty of free smells, we spoke of days prior and the legends we have since become.
On the road once more, Margaret and I shared the joys of going to Catholic school and the perks that went along with it – most notably the joys of cotton balls with glued-on googly eyes and joining band only so you could get out of going to church in the morning. Arriving in Galesburg, we dropped Margaret off, said our goodbyes, and went on our way back home.
Forty hours later I was back where I started: in my kitchen, messenger bag around my shoulder, cooler at my side. Only then Adam hadn’t spent time under a bed, Eric’s spiritual experiences were at a minimum, Margaret had no notion of standing an hour in the rain and I had no idea so much fun could be had in such a short time.
Later that night, positive that no one was awake, I clean out the cooler and put it back on the neighbor’s porch from where it came. Along with a handpicked flower and a bottle of cheap wine I leave inside, was the simple note:
Thanks for the great weekend
That ill-fated night