Fleetmack.com - Memories Part IV

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"I wrote my friend a letter with a highlighting pen, but he could not read it, he thought I was trying to show him certain parts of a piece of paper." --Mitch Hedberg

Memories....ahhhhh memories from the glory days
Part IV
10-21-03

Back by popular demand, we have more stories being posted from my mind, enjoy.

Although I'm not very proud of this one, it's a pretty good story. I had just turned 17 and was going out with Middi and Berno one night for some reason. We road-tripped over to Denison in Berno's truck, had a few tallboys, and drove back to Carroll. We decided it was Miller time so we went to a friend's place so he could buy us some beer. Middi, our supplier, and myself jump in the truck Mexican style and drive to the ghetto grocery store - Food 4 Less. Our buyer was going to just get us a case of beer, but we wanted a bottle of vodka (you can buy liquor at grocery stores in Iowa) too and it was way too expensive, so Middi and I flipped a coin to see who would steal it, this was commonplace for us to do so it was no big deal. I lost the toss so was volunteered to steal the bottle of vodka. I go in the store, put the thing in my inside pocket in my coat and walk around for awhile, then I leave. No biggie, just another day. Well, two guys were waiting for me outside the store, one says "Hey man, let me see what's in your pockets." I immediately know I'm fucked so I just take the vodka out and hand it to him. I fully expect him to tell us to just get the fuck out of there as they've done that to others several times before, but one guy says to me "Come up to the office, the cops are on the way." I pretend like I'm going to walk with them then turn around and take off sprinting, in my bowling shoes (which I stole about a week earlier from the bowling alley). One of the guys takes off after me and grabs onto my coat, I elbow him in the stomach and he falls in the mud, I keep running and get away. Now it's about 10 degrees outside and I'm running about 4 miles from anywhere I could call friendly. The cops were looking for me so I hid in random back yards for awhile, sometimes behind a log pile, as I watched the cops drive by with a spotlight looking for me. I finally made it to Joe Owen's house and wanted him to drive me home, no such luck, he wasn't there. His parents or someone let me use their phone so I called Schau to pick me up. Schau came and got me and we drove around for awhile, I figured I was off scott-free. Wrong answer. I get home around midnight and my dad comes running out yelling at me, I'm like "fuck". So I try lying to them then just flat-out admitted it, went to the cop shop, got charged with whatever, served my punishment by doing communtiy service for the next month with Beth Dunn and Shaun Meiners (who got busted for other shit at the same time). I think we had to clean Kuemper on the weekends, clean the locker rooms, sweep halls, sand down desks, shit like that - it sucked. At one time during communtiy service, our supervisor gave us some money and told us to go buy some squeegies from Wal-Mart to clean windows with. Sure enough, we had learned our lesson. We pocketed the money and went and stole the squeegies from a gas station. By the way -- how did the cops ever find me? I got ratted out by my friend, I was pissed when I found that out but realized a year or so later that he had no other choice, so it's all good.

The Kuemper Field House is this little brick building about 3 blocks from our old high school. It is (was) our weight room, wrestling practice area, football locker rooms, and practice field for the football team. The place reeked and had flies everywhere. In fact, during senior football, the flies were so bad I bought like 10 rolls of fly-tape and put them up in the locker room, they were full within like 2 days, it was disgusting. The place reeked and had this old 1986 ghetto blaster. I had a mix tape of pumped up music I put in it that we listened to every day for like 2 years while putting pads on. So much funny shit happened in that locker room and so much drama happened in the parking lot of that place (we'll get to that later). Junior year during football practice, we caught a mouse. At the same time, we noticed that Muggs was late for practice. Pedelty killed the mouse and put it in Mugg's cleats. Muggs got there in a rush as our whole team sat there and watched him put his pads on in a dead sprint. Then he goes to put his cleats on. You know how you wiggle your foot around to get it in your shoe when your laces aren't all that loose? Well, his laces were loose yet he still had to wiggle to get his foot in there as the mouse took up so much space. So we're in practice for a good half-hour and Muggs has no clue that there's still a mouse in his shoe. Finally someone says "Muggs, you're walking a little funny, got a rock in your shoe or something?" He sits down and unties his shoe, the mouse falls out - completely squashed - and his sock is solid red from the mouse's blood. He immediately gets pissed and finds out Pedelty did it, he tackles him and is ready to beat the shit out of him, even the coaches were laughing too hard to control themselves. I was on the defensive line at the time, and so was Muggs. Later in practice, we were doing some tackling drills and I was lined up against Muggs. Now please note that at the time, Muggs weighed a good 40 pounds more than me and had about 6 years more of football experience than I did. So there I am, lined up against him, our heads about 6" apart, I say "Let's see what you got mouse boy." I've never been hit that hard in my life....or have I?

Senior year football, homecoming week, scrimmage time. I'm playing defensive end and we can't touch the quarterback. I break through the line and get to the QB, and touch him. Whistle blows - play dead. I stand straight up...out of nowhere, Bill nails me like he never even heard the whistle. Gets his helmet under my chin and knocks me flat on my back and completely knocks the wind out of me, I was a sitting duck. I stand up and am standing alone, everyone's pants appear yellow (they were white - appeared yellow to me) and I literally saw stars everywhere. I say out loud, but to myself "When did we get yellow practice pants?" Someone behind me says "What the fuck is he talking about?" I start to walk and can't even walk straight, so I walk up to Coach - who hates me, and say "Coach, I need to sit out I'm hurtin' bad." He calls me a "stiff" and tells me to go to the sideline. It's raining hard at the time and Coach Urwin had a golf car he drove around during practice, and the field was turning to mud. Coach Kohorst says to me "Mack, move the golf cart over to the cement, will ya?" I stumble to the golf car and sit down, but won't move. I couldn't figure out why the thing wouldn't move. Kohorst is watching me and I look at him and say "I think it's broke." Kohorst replies with "Try using the gas pedal." I do - the cart moves. Never thought about using a gas pedal, I assumed it just ran on its own. He says "Are you ok? Go sit down for awhile." I go to the sidelines and sit down with all the freshman and sophomores who are sitting there waiting to be utilized as practice dummies, I take off my helmet, immediately about 3 guys say "holy shit!" I'm like "what". "You're cut BAD!" Sure enough, my chin was split wide open from Bill's helmet. Had to go get stitched up and diagnosed with a "Mild Concussion." Now let me tell you this -- if that's a mild concussion, I don't EVER want to experience a full concussion, that fucking hurt and fucked my head up bad, I had no idea what was going on for the rest of the afternoon! It was horrible. On top of that, I had stitches in my face with a huge band-aid covering it up for homecoming my senior year of high school and couldn't play in the homecoming game! And yet on top of that, I cut that thing open for the next 3 years every time I shaved, as I ended up splitting it open 2 more times over the course of the football season. And yet on top of that, the bastards have a close-up picture of my face with stitches covered by a band aid on my chin in the yearbook. Maybe I'll scan that some day. Bastards. But hey - it's a great story, isn't it?

Senior year of college - random tuesday night about a month before I graduated. We're hammered, it's 2am, we're ordering Jimmy Johns (sub sandwich delivery), so foggy you can't see 10 feet in front of you, and we decide we need to have some fun. It's Joe, Hornick, Meiners, and myself. First off - let's throw some eggs. We go get 2 cartons of eggs from the fridge. We go egg the neighbors house, we stand on the sidewalk and throw eggs at people as they walk by, then we were bored, so we threw the rest of our eggs at our own house. One time Hornick was standing in the entry way of our house and I was outside, I turned to gun an egg at him but he dodged it and it flew in our house and splattered all over our living room. Point being - it was commonplace for us to throw eggs even at ourselves. Although Hornick graduated college with damn near a 4.0 and Meiners and I pulled off our 3.0ishs in 4 years, we weren't the brightest people I've ever met. On this particular night, however, just throwing eggs wasn't enough to satisfy our drunken stupidity needs. We decided to burn some stuff. At first it was empty paper bags in our living room, but then after we almost set the floor and house on fire, we decided we'd better burn stuff outside. (by the way, I'm going to post some video clips of this online as I taped the whole thing). We drag one of our recliners outside and put about an entire can of lighter fluid on it. As we're doing this, a cop drives by and looks over at us. This wasn't about to stop us. We then drug the recliner into the middle of the street and torched it. You've never seen flames like this ignite a piece of furniture like this before, unreal. The flames had to be at least 12-15 feet in the air as this blaze of smoke arose from the chair. No exaggeration - within 15 seconds of lighting it on fire, teh cops were there, luckily we got back in the house in time and turned the lights off. There we stood in the house, me taping the whole thing -- for one lousy chair (at 3am) they brought 3 cop cars, a fire truck, and about 7 firemen. The were there for 2 hours, even though it took all of 30 seconds and one fire extinguisher to put the chair out. The cops never busted us, no idea why not, we were idiots. But damn that was fun! We had to have cost the city of Ames at least a couple of grand that night, fun times fun times.

Here's some videos from that night....

Preparing the chair to get set on fire as a cop drives by and Mandy smokes.....

Some random kid walking home from the bar.....

Setting the chair on fire and the cops arriving.....

Back to stories of the Field house parking lot. Remember that this is long before the time of CD Burners. Our minimum drive for a football game was about an hour and a half or so, so I (along with everyone else) had a walkman with mix tapes. Well, Middi got ahold of one of my mix tapes and liked it so he kept it. After school I run up to his car and ask for my tape back, he says "I'll give it to you when we get to the field house (for football practice)". So I pull up to the field house, turn my car off, turn around and see Middi driving up across the grass to get to the lot as opposed to the driveway, he smashes head first into some chick's car at about 25 mph and gets his head smashed into the windshield. There's this huge bubble in the windshield from where his head hit and he's bleeding bad. I run up to the car "Middi, you alright?" Typical fashion for the man, he's laughing, "Man, I fucked that car up!" he says. He goes and gets stitches in his head, they total out his car, and I never saw my mix tape again. Luckily Middi was alright, but trust me, that man has wrecked more cars than Monster Joe's Truck 'N Tow.

Speaking of accidents and car mishaps in the parking lot of the field house, one time we got back from our Friday night game at around 1am or so, I had to piss like a racehorse. I grabbed my bag of pads and sprinted into the fireld house. The bus just pulls into the field house lot - which is very narrow - and turns around to get out. Since I was in there pissing already, I figured I'd put my pads in my locker as well so I didn't have to haul them home. By the time I got done doing this, most everyone had left the parking lot already so the bus driver thought it was safe to turn the bus around and get out of there. Nope, not quite safe, the fucker basically drove over my car, he drug the entire length of the bus across my Oldsmobile Calais Supreme and fucked hte whole passenger side of the car up. No headlights means I can't drive home. So there I am, 1 in the morning at age 16 in the parking lot alone with a nearly totaled car and a bus driver. We call the cops, fill out an accident report, and - for the first time since about 5th grade - a bus drove me home that night. At about 2am, Mom looks out the window and sees a big yellow school bus parked in front of our house and I get out, dressed in shirt and tie, with a gym bag and no car. Yup, the bus driver fucked me over bad that day...but not as bad as someone else fucked me and my car over in that lot.....

Time: 2am. Situation: Just arriving back to the Field house from a lost road football game in Clarinda, Iowa. The bus pulls up, everyone is exhaused and it is late and we are upset becuase we lost. We get off the bus, we get our pads and bags and stuff, and head to our cars. I am way exhaused and don't want to go put my pads away, so I walk around to the back of my car in the pitch black. I get my keys out and try to find the keyhole to my trunk. Can't find it. I go in the field house and turn on a light so I can see. My trunk is all fucked up as some jackass tried breaking into my car. They pried off the keyhole and bent the trunk to shit with a crowbar, but never even got in. Estimated damage to my car: $500. Estimated value of speakers and amp in trunk: $200. They didn't even get my stuff. Fucking cock suckers. Let's fast-forward to Freshman year in high school. A bunch of us are sitting in Hart & Wilson's dorm room and Hornick informs me he knows who broke into my car. "Duper and Riesberg." I am pissed beyond belief. I never really cared for Reisberg but we got along well. Duper (nicknamed after Mark Duper of the Dolphins) was always considered one of my friends. I went to my computer, looked up Duper's email address on the Iowa Lakes Community College website, and shot him an email telling him I thought we were friends and to watch the fuck out if he ever see's me again because I'm going to beat the living shit out of him. About a month later, when I'm visiting my parents, Duper calls me up. His voice quivering like he's scared. He apologized, he very sincerely apologized. I told him he was forgiven but to fuck off and I will still beat the shit out of him until he pays me off for the damage done to my car. My parents actually paid to fix the car, and I fully intended on giving them the money as soon as Duper gave it to me. He promised he would get me the money. A year goes by. Nothing. Finally, Hornick and I are at Red's in Breda for somebody'a (Lohrmann maybe?) 21st birthday party. I see Duper. I immediately confront him and start reaming him out, he takes defense. Hornick comes over and starts getting into it with about 3 of Dupe's friends. To end this story short - brawl almost ensues, Bryan never gets his money, and I take it in the ass and get no money out of the deal. Why is this a story?

And the book is closed for Memories Part IV.