Streets of Fire

Hard Times

The other evening there was a knock on our front door after dark. We’d ordered a pizza not more than 10 minutes before, so I figured it was the delivery man and thought perhaps I’d called the wrong Papa John’s: not the one down the street, but the one in the future, which already knew our order before we’d even placed it and was able to deliver in less than 10 minutes.

Even though I didn’t see the standard markings of a pizza-delivery driver on the young black woman standing at our front door, I remained unconvinced she wasn’t harboring a half-pepperoni, half-cheese pizza on her someplace, or alternatively, from the future to kill us in order to prevent a nuclear apocalypse.

She introduced herself and said she was with a group called Guiding Light, or Guardian Angels, Grieving Hands, or some two-term phrase starting with a “G” that could have either been a hard-nosed biker gang or an inner-city youth organization, the latter of which she claimed to be a part. She also told me her name, which went into my left ear and directly out of my right, but I clearly recall that it didn’t sound - nor did she look - as if she was in a biker gang. I bought the inner-city youth group organization story, but remained hopeful that she also had some pizza in her knapsack.

She jumped into a chronicle about all the struggles she’d experienced through her life - hard times - and I believed her. In fact, I didn’t mind giving her a few moments to tell me her story. After all, I had nothing to do but wait for our pizza, and to obtain the pizza I would’ve had to step out onto the porch to meet the delivery guy anyway, and I was already out there, so I may as well listen to a stranger talk about her hardships growing up in the projects. But if the pizza arrived during her monologue, I’d have probably cut her off. “Pizza before some stranger’s hardship stories,” as grandpa always taught me.

She told me she had dreams of becoming a teacher. I think. Or was it “barista?” Maybe she said she wanted to be a pizza-delivery man. I’m not entirely certain, as I was pretty hungry and thinking mostly about the pizza en route to our house on the edge of suburbia. And I was tired, and it was dark outside, and I didn’t know this person’s name even though she told me. But mostly, I’m a horrible listener. Also, did I request an extra garlic sauce when I called Papa John’s? Was I going to have to share one little cup of garlic sauce between two people? Because sharing a single garlic sauce, even with one person who you’ve sworn to stay with until you die, is complete agony. Continuing to carry on about her hardships, she then put the question to me.

“Could you share with me the types of struggles you’ve been through?”

Now I was stuck. She’d just told me stories of witnessing drug deals and watching people she knew die from drive-by shootings. I couldn’t really compete. Going to high school in southern New Hampshire, I didn’t experience much gang-related violence or a single bullet through the front window of our Cape Cod style home. My biggest struggle growing up was the frequent blanket of white snow that shut down our quaint New England town and forced us to stay home from school and go sledding at the nearby golf course, oblivious to the realities of the less-fortunate. Several times I was bullied, but never with a weapon, and nothing so severe that I’m still haunted, even though I still think John Hames from 9th grade was a complete asshole.

I considered bringing some levity to the situation in order to get the girl to laugh at my own personal “hardships.” That morning, I’d forgotten my sunglasses at home and had to go through an entire day squinting, which gave me a headache. It wasn’t such a bad headache that I had to take aspirin or anything. I’d had worse headaches. Migraines when I was younger, even. Does a headache count as a struggle? Oh, and as it turned out, my sunglasses were in my car the whole time! I’d just put them in the arm-rest compartment, not the drop-down case in the roof where I typically store them. “Can you believe that?” I could have told her. “Times were tough.”

But I didn’t tell her that story, and asked how I could help out. Of course, help came in the form of giving my credit card information to her to write on a little form in her hands and take to a place I did not know. On my doorstep was a stranger who I’m sure had gone through many personal hardships, but she also told me she wasn’t from inner-city Richmond - five miles away - but rather, New Orleans. I apologized sincerely and wished her good luck, but said I could not in good faith just hand out a credit card number to someone I didn’t know. I mentioned I’d take a look at her organization and consider donating, but by the time the front door had closed behind me, I couldn’t remember the name of her group, or what her face looked like, but man, how I wanted that pizza. Plus, Seinfeld was on TV, and it was one of the few with David Puddy. 

Inner-city life is tough. Mine is decidedly not, and to her level will never be. I didn’t blame her, just the questionably legit group that sent a struggling black youth out to a random middle-class mostly white neighborhood in the late evening, on the edge of suburbia, in a dark town that wasn’t her own, to ask a stranger anxiously awaiting a pizza for money. There’s a better way to overcome.

Coincidence

• [Sitting at coffee shop]
• Dude: "Hey, are you Jeff?"
• Me: "Yes, hi!"
• Dude: "It's me, Matt."
• Me: "Hi, Matt."
• [Awkward pause, as if he's waiting for me to acknowledge who he is]
• Me: "Sorry, have we met?"
• Dude: "On the phone. We had a meeting this morning, yes?"
• Me: "I don't think...what now?"
• Dude: "You're Jeff [last name that wasn't mine], right?"
• Me: "No, Kelley. Ha!"
• Then we giggled for a little while, realized we had some mutual friends, and who knows, maybe we'll grab that coffee some day.

Inspiration

Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.

Although, if you think about it: most stars are pretty far away from the moon, many times with distances measured in light years and like 20 zeros on the end. “Among the stars” is more of a misnomer. Should you miss the moon, you’ll be nowhere near any of the stars, marooned all alone to mostly suffer what will likely be a slow and painful death as you tumble and twirl throughout the depths of the universe and into utter oblivion. The truth is that unless you have some sort of rocket or otherwise fast spacecraft, you’ll never make it among those stars in your lifetime. Better make sure your coordinates and directions to the moon are accurate, and that you’ve practiced sticking the landing, because you sure as hell don’t want to miss that thing.

It’s also a good idea to pack some extra oxygen, just to be safe. You’ll of course need enough to make it to the moon, as there is no oxygen in space (nor are there any fill-up stations on the way out), and you’ll need lots more if it should you fail to negotiate the moon landing and find yourself attempting to navigate the highly treacherous environment of outer space. Bring some extra food, too, because there’s only one McDonald’s up there, and it is on the moon.

(There is a 7-Eleven around the corner from HR-1855, but they are always out of hot dogs and their chip selection blows.)

You also need to worry about space junk shooting around everywhere, which I saw on TV once actually put a gaping hole in piece of steel. I’m not sure why the steel was up in space. It may have been part of the space station, or the steel was perhaps another piece of space garbage clanking into some more space garbage, thus causing a gaping hole. The point is that space junk can kill you, and so can aliens with their futuristic flying saucers and hulking gunships, which will also be milling about, should you miss the moon.

For this reason, it’s important for dreamers who shoot for the moon to equip their rocketships with a little black pill, just in case they miss and go tumbling uncontrollably into the cavernous, unending and supremely terrifying depths of the Milky Way. Pop just one pill, throw on some Speedwagon, tightly clutch that locket of your mother and close your eyes. If for some reason the pill doesn’t work - about 2 percent are unaffected by it - there’s a revolver with eight bullets in that locker to the rear of the lunar module.

Shoot for the moon. If you miss, the outlook honestly isn’t that great. Though I guess you could also just save enough gas for a return trip home.

Cosmonaut And Me

Outside of a small contingent of fine people, most every person I know lives on the East Coast, and they are asleep. Tonight I am on the West Coast, and I do not spend much time on the West Coast, and there is a three-hour time difference between here and home. It is 10:25 p.m. here right now. I don’t know what time it is back home, as I’m never awake then.

With everyone I know asleep, any text, email, chat, or phone call to them will go unanswered.

I sense this feeling of isolation is similar to what it’ll be like for that first cosmonaut who goes to Mars either alone or becomes alone after the co-pilot dies of a space garbage wallop to the temple during the six-month journey to the red planet. The guy is out there on Mars, desolate, wondering what everyone back at home is up to, but he has no way of reaching them. Of course, now that I think of it, NASA would likely equip the cosmonaut’s space ship with all sorts of communications devices so he could talk to people back home. Or she; I don’t want to imply that the first person on Mars will be a man, however likely. Maybe there was a woman on the flight, but she got a glob of space garbage to the head and is dead now.

Still, for the lone probably male cosmonaut, when night falls on Earth in the section of the globe where he lives, not even those fancy communications devices will work. He’ll have to wait until his friends and family wake up to talk to them again. Although considering that a Mars day is only 39 minutes longer than a day on Earth, perhaps the cosmonaut will get lucky and find himself on a part of Mars completely synched up with the very point he lives on Earth. Then at most, at any given moment, he may be only 39 minutes ahead or behind his loved ones. In this case, a cosmonaut on Mars for four years will feel closer to the people he knows more than I will during my four days on the West Coast. 

Stepping back, however, I realize I’m not under any threat of a Martian jumping out of a crater and thrashing his strong-as-steel tentacle through my space mask, tearing open my face and pumping noxious venom into my body, forcing my guts to slowly expand and explode. And I am thankful for that, so I still choose being in California over another planet.

Ascension

We sipped our fresh-poured Bud Light pints as our eyes met across the table. I could tell our minds were in the same place, one of the only places they’d been for five months. And that place was not this bar.

“We have to do this tonight,” I told him. I lit a cigarette and did that thing where you flick the lighter with one hand while your other hand covers the tip of the stick, like how Clint Eastwood would do before he delivers a climactic monologue to a villain. Also, I wasn’t really smoking, nor do I smoke, but it sounds cool to put that detail in here. “It’s time,” my friend replied.

We threw some cash on the table and bolted out the front door. It may have actually been two credit cards, and in all likelihood we probably waited for the waitress to bring and return the check, and then politely thanked her, but you get the idea. Out we ran: up Main, down Mulberry, left on Grove, right on Boulevard, and into my apartment to prepare ourselves to do something illegal. 

It was May 2007, and since December, a 100-foot-tall yellow tower crane had been parked across the street, working during daylight hours to put the foundation in place for the art museum’s multi-million dollar expansion. At night, the T-shaped steel dinosaur would sit dormant, its boom looming high above the Boulevard all alone in the darkness, its fence wide with gaps and no security, just taunting us to come play, climb up her trunk, and swing from her branches.

Our adrenaline was racing, and despite the angel on my shoulder that resembled me trying hard to get us to reconsider this climb, there was absolutely no going back. Over the course of fifteen seconds I exchanged my shorts for dark jeans; the button-down became a black long-sleeve; flip-flops morphed into Nikes. Austen got a loaner black shirt with the In-N-Out logo on the back, though he decided to keep his shorts and flops. Of course, no tower crane ascension would be complete without beer, so we grabbed the nearest six-pack of Coors Light, threw it in a backpack, and made our way across the street toward the crane’s concrete base. Whatever potential punishment awaited us we accepted; with clean records, at most, we’d get a night in a jail cell and a sub-$1,000 fine, and at a minimum, a slap on the wrist. So the calculated risk, in this case, was worth the reward. I guess the reward was getting to tell people we did it, and the killer view, but mostly the bragging thing. I don’t really have an answer to the reward question.

Death was furthest from our minds. I mean, it’s not like we were doing something stupid. 

We climbed through an opening in the steel and began our ascension. When I tell people we climbed a crane, many wonder why we’d put ourselves in such danger. The women, mostly; men think it’s pretty hardcore and completely understand the fascination with tall things made of metal. The thing is, one has to try to get hurt on a crane. See, the path to the top is not a straight vertical shot up the mast. We’d studied it and knew that the reality of crane-climbing is that you go up 15 steps surrounded by a metal cage, arrive at a caged platform, walk around to the next set of stairs, then climb the next 15 steps surrounded by a cage. Repeat about a dozen times. If you fall, the most you’ll drop is about 10 feet. 

Getting from the mast’s ladders and onto the horizontal jib proved rather challenging, as you have to pull yourself up through a 7-foot-tall hole; I recalled the inside of the spacecraft in Apollo 13. This hole was a part of the crane’s slewing unit, essentially the engine that allows the machine to rotate. Once through this gap, we made our way onto the back of the jib, cracked two Silver Bullets, and soaked up the view. A clear night offered us a full panorama of the Richmond region on a platform as safe as any tall building’s roof, though I’m sure the crane’s insurer would beg to differ. Past the low-flung tree-lined city streets gave way to the downtown skyline, some three miles away. You could see the glow of the giant suburban multiplex about 15 miles west. And the stadium lights from the baseball diamond just down the street. And the little ant-people walking around on the sidewalks below, paying no attention to the joyous wonder taking place a few dozen feet overhead.

We stayed on top of the crane for about an hour and a half, sipping beer and looking around and talking about nothing of particular importance. Eventually we decided it was probably time to stop drinking and playing with heavy machinery while sitting on a platform 100 feet up in the air. Getting off the crane was probably the smartest decision we’d made all night, but it certainly didn’t feel like it.

Six months later, I walked out my front door one morning, and the crane was gone. Disassembled, packed up, and hauled off to a new construction site, where two other idiots would consider scaling it for five months before finally doing it one night. Two years after that, construction of the building’s wing was completed and new Virginia Museum of Fine Arts opened to the public. Two years later, in a restaurant on the top floor of the addition that was built by that crane, I gave the toast at our wedding reception. I did, however, leave out this detail.

Emergency

The call yesterday came from a number I did not recognize, but I picked it up anyway since I had nothing better to do at the time but drive. It was my 91-year-old grandfather on the other end, apparently using the cell phone that, outside of the occasional storm surge that knocks out power and phone service as it had just done, stays bricked in a desk drawer somewhere inside the tri-level house he finished paying for in 1972.

“Jeffrey? It’s your Grandad. Do you all have power?”

We did, I told him. What did they need, I asked, fearing a tree was in their living room. Food or medication, I wondered. I hoped no one had fallen in the dark of the unpowered house, or, worse, that they were unable to eat at their regular 4:30 p.m. dinner time. I was even prepared to offer a place to sleep.

“Well, our freezers have been shut off for two hours, and our ice cream and frozens are going to melt.” To a humble, elderly white man living off a hefty Exxon pension that could buy him new ice creams and frozen foods almost ninety-thousand times over, this plight still amounts to a crisis.

“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” I told him. And so I diverted my track to the Vietnamese restaurant where our dinner order was waiting for pickup, pulled up to my grandfather’s tri-level and filled up two paper bags with their two-for-one Turkey Hill ice cream tubs and various brightly colored frozen food boxes. The bags were oversized ones from Olive Garden’s take-out service, because my grandfather is a simple man who doesn’t care what the local newspaper reviewer writes about the hip new restaurant with a single-noun name like “Salt” or “Ground” that was recently opened by a chef who has a sister restaurant in New York called “Pepper” or “air” (lowercase for effect), or perhaps trained under some bozo in Europe. He’d rather toss me the keys to his Lincoln Town Car and ask to drive us all to the Olive Garden, because it’s consistent and has comfortable seating and there are unlimited-based menu options. He also enjoys Red Lobster and has a hard time understanding how some minorities can afford to eat there, though we tend to always let this subtle commentary pass as a generational feature. He’s a sweet man.

Among the items I kept in the safety of our Kenmore’s freezer space - ample, I’ve since learned - were several empty green Country Crock margarine canisters filled with my Grandad’s homemade pork tenderloin and brown gravy, the latter a mixture of bacon grease, pork fat, butter, salt, cholesterol, oil and whatever remnants have piled up over decades of being fried up in a black iron skillet. It’s amazing but not for the faint of heart, literally and figuratively. And this morning, with several pounds of this substance accessible in my own home, I made four pieces of pork loin with a side of eggs. Neither the eggs or the pork was as good as he makes them, but I was more than pleased with the outcome. It was way better than Corn Flakes.

I checked in with him tonight. Figured that the power was back on, and therefore his flip phone was blacked out in a desk somewhere, and called the same number he’s had since the early 1950s.

“You all okay? Power up?” I asked.

“All good here,” he said.

I told him I’d bring his food back tomorrow evening sometime. “And I bet you can’t guess what I ate for breakfast,” I added.

“I hope it wasn’t any of my food.” And then, because he already knew, he laughed.

Black Baby And Me

I could see the situation brewing from as far back as row 10. It’s always about a dozen rows out when one begins assessing seating assignments on an airplane, figuring out who you’ll be flying beside and who you’ll pretend doesn’t exist for a few hours. It’s also at this point when men - all straight men, every single one of them every single time - are hoping to spot a young woman on her way to a Sports Illustrated photo shoot in the Caribbean islands in the seat beside theirs. Sometimes this scenario actually occurs, although once you arrive at your seat, you realize your perspective was skewed and the model and her slightly exposed midriff is actually one row back. In any case, you’re at least hoping for someone worthy of one last all-or-nothing makeout session should the engines fail midflight or the tail wing pops off like in Lost.

On this flight, I got to sit beside a lady. And I also got to sit beside the infant daughter on her lap and her two-year-old son in the window seat. It was 11:29 p.m.; this was the final flight of my day. I also must mention that this woman was African-American because, without race, this is the story of a white man and a a white woman and a white baby and the moment they all shared together, and that’s boring. The woman greeted me, and yes, I’m going to write what she said like a Southern black woman would say it: “Oh, this man be thinkin’ to his-self, ‘Why’d they put me in a seat ‘side ‘dese two little kee-ids?’”

The kee-ids were of course going to be screamers, which they did as if being relentlessly beaten with a claw hammer once the plane began inching backwards. But I didn’t really mind sitting near wailing children. You can’t complain about sitting near ballistic kids on a plane, just as you can’t - or shouldn’t - flail your arms and get upset and shout the word “Fuck” when the car in front of you decides to brake, stop, and parallel park. “How dare you decide to park your automobile, I’m driving behind you! Can’t you see that, shithead!? Fuck!” Kids on planes and parallel parking are both simply part of the overall transportation process.

I did worry, however, that this woman would think I was annoyed with my seating arrangement: me, the lone male traveler late at night; and she, the woman with two small, very near-future howl-beasts. I also had concerns that, being a white man from Virginia, she perhaps had an immediate poor impression of me. And so, for these reasons, I had to make small talk to prove I was sincere, tolerant of kids, and let her know I was a good, non-racist white person who, despite that, does of course maintain stereotypes of all ethnic backgrounds, including those of white people. Especially those of white people.

“You from Richmond?” I asked. We were on the ground in Charlotte.

“Originally. Now I live in Jackson [Mississippi],” she replied.

“Oh! The town from The Help!” I didn’t say that, barely, though the word “Oh!” popped out and made it sound as if I was elated she lived in Jackson. But unless I wanted to discuss the Cash-Carter duet, I knew nothing else about Jackson outside of being the setting of The Help and it being a centerpiece in the Civil Rights era where some horrible, horrible things happened. None of these things made for protracted airplane chatter.

It’s unlikely this woman and I had any shared interests outside of the basics like pizza and movies, or having eyes. I got passive in my approach to find a connection, opening up the Kanye West album with the bright red cover on my iPhone in plain sight, hoping to catch her eye to let her know that I was hip on the hip-hop scene. Really my hip-hop interests are largely limited to West, but she didn’t need to know that I don’t own any Wu-Tang or Three 6. Either way, the screen went to black before she had a chance to glance over and realize I was on her side.

At one point she opened up a bottle filled with water and struggled to juggle the two kids while filling the container with Enfamil. I asked her to let me hold the bottle to ease her stress; initially reluctant, not wanting to be a burden, she caved and gave me the plastic vial while she scooped in some baby formula and fed her daughter. Both kids, soon after, fell asleep.

The lights flickered on as the aircraft began its descent, and the flight attendant told the woman that her two-year-old - asleep in her arms after having Houdini’d out of his seatbelt during takeoff and into his mother’s arms - had to be in a seat. The window seat was now occupied by the sleeping baby, and swapping the two kids would have meant more crying, more screaming. So I did what had to be done - for God, for country, for this woman, for the sanity of the other passengers on this flight who would become perturbed by the sound of a wailing child on an airplane at midnight, likely the same ones who get mad and swear when the car in front of them finds a parking space.

“I’ll hold your baby,” I told her.

Look, I’m no hero. But the look that came across that woman’s face, well, you’d have thought I’d erased centuries of racial tension in just four short words. She smiled and agreed, and handed over her young daughter to a white man who was only slightly more than a stranger. I held this kid and patted her back as the plane dropped through the clouds during a thunderstorm, roaring and bumping violently and making you hope the guy who bolted on the wings knew what the hell he was doing, all the while attempting to browse the Hammacher Schlemmer page in SkyMall. It got difficult trying to read about the specific dimensions of the dog crate end tables with this kid in the way, and plus she’d just puked Enfamil down the sleeve of my Gap shirt.

For a moment, as I held this child whose name I will never know, I imagined leaving it all behind: My job, my loving wife, my friends, everything I’ve created in Virginia, and following my seatmate back to Jackson. We’d get a small house on the river there, if Jackson even has a river, and I’d work in a corner office overlooking Jackson’s vast marshlands, assuming there are vast marshlands, and begin my screenplay, a love story about some armored truck robbers - a cross between Heat and The Notebook. I’d learn to drive a motorcycle and we’d get matching neck tattoos, though really it’d only be me getting one to match the Chinese symbol she already had inked on her sternocleidomastoid. We’d grow old together there in Jackson, just me and her and these two kee-ids and our matching neck tattoos and my armored truck love story, on a quaint river house if there’s even a river there.

Our moment together was almost over, though. After we landed it became apparent that, were I to give the kid back, she would have to wait for everyone to deplane before getting off. So I canceled that option for her, grabbed the kid in one arm and took my suitcase out of the overhead with the other, and walked both off the jetway. A coworker who had been sitting several rows ahead and deplaned before us was waiting for me, and when he saw a young black baby in my arms, was likely wondering how long we’d been in the air. The woman and her son and the baby and me marched through the airport and baggage claim all the way to a waiting Dodge Durango and the woman’s father - the infant’s grandfather - standing at the curbside.

I was told he’d never met his granddaughter before, and with a confused (“Whitey?”) but elated (“My babies!”) look on his face, gently took the girl from my arms. My seatmate put out a hand to shake as thanks; I extended mine, sour puke-covered Gap sleeve and all, and gave her a fist-bump. We’d made our connection.

A Description Of My Hotel

When traveling, in lieu of racking up points, I always try to stay in hotels that cost the same or less than a Marriott, Hilton, and the like but are more unique and independent. I think people call them “boutiques,” but I refuse to use that term unless I’m referring to an arrangement of cut flowers.

Instead of sharing a photograph, I have decided to describe this hotel in written form: it is called the Night Hotel, and as the name would suggest, it is very dark and what you’d get if Marilyn Manson and Marilyn Monroe got together and created a hotel: Gothic and perhaps slightly terrifying, yet classy and once posed in Playboy.

My room measures about 100 by 100, and that is in inches. The bathroom is approximately 7 by 3, and that is in centimeters.

I very much enjoy this hotel. But it is not for everyone, particularly those who prefer a bit more living space, light, and pictures of fully clothed people on the walls instead of naked people.

As such, I would not recommend this hotel to families, because as noted, there are photographs of topless women on pretty much every floor. I would say the women in the photographs are attractive and not very ugly, and also quite model-esque. Part of me is actually starting to believe that the women in the photos have actual modeling careers, and make a living being in these types of pictures. The ladies have a look in their eyes that seems as if they either a.) want to make love to whoever is looking at the photograph or b.) eviscerate you with a forged 9-inch Wusthof. I have looked at the photographs several times (for the articles) and cannot say with certainty which is the case, though I would prefer to never have my bowels violently removed through my belly by a hot woman. By the way, there are no articles.

Some members of a family might find this whole picture thing kind of cool (dads, sons, daughters who are leaning that way), but for most traditional American nuclear families this hotel feature is not ideal. Please do not tell my mother about the naked lady pictures in the hotel, or that I am alone in New York City without a guardian.

This hotel would be a great place to bring back and impress, then later score with, a woman. But like, if the woman also happens to be a vampire. It would go down like this: You are dressed in hip Levi’s 527s and one of those cool all-black button-down cowboy shirts with the pearl snap buttons. I love that style shirt. You walk with your boys to a bar that is packed with vampires, and you decide that you really want to take home one of the undead babes. So you order yourself a Jack Daniels on the rocks “and some blood, shaken, for the lady in black over there.” Then you talk to her for a while, and ask her where she’s staying. “The Hilton,” she replies, really vampire-like. “I’m at the Night,” you say, and she gets that little twinkle in her eyes that seems so say that she wants to go back to your hotel, make love to you, then murder you by biting and turn you into a mythological creature. And so you wave at the bartender for your tab, and you leave with a vampire honey, and you walk back to the Night Hotel, and you mosey into the lobby which looks like the set of a photo shoot for Giorgio Armani (and if it is not black, it is white; and if it is not white, it is polished chrome). You take the vampire up to your Gothic room on the 8th floor - same color scheme as the lobby - and immediately impress the hottie goblin, begin making out, then slide into home base just before you get murdered and come back to life a few minutes later, as a succubus.

Also there are some really comfortable robes in the room, and I like that aspect, but the minibar prices are out of this world! Still, four stars (out of four).

Kevin

Kevin was the coolest kid in the class, by far, and everyone knew it. He’d earned this title simply because of his prolific athletic ability, and, I think, sick buzz cut. He wore diamond-insignia’d Umbros and his soccer team’s shirt to school every day, which in North Carolina was the signature style of third grade hipness. I looked up to Kevin, partly because he was about two feet taller and, physically, shorter people would have to do so in order to look at his awesome, exquisitely chiseled face. But also, I looked up to him because he was a genuinely nice guy. Plus, Kevin is a cool name. And the buzz cut factor.

While I forget the circumstances of the class contest, I remember vividly that I won. This leads me to believe that the contest required possessing no athletic abilities in any possible way - from throwing or catching a ball, to running, to sitting down fastest. For me to win a contest, it would also have not included: math, paying attention, women, focusing, committing to learning new things such as any musical instrument or web design beyond simple HTML, knowledge of automobile parts, playing poker with the guys, knowing how to play poker in the first place, when to begin braking a car, keeping up with the best new musicians, carpentry besides hammering nails, or fishing.

Kevin would have won all of those contests, for sure, because he was the manliest 8-year-old I knew, probably had leg hair, and could operate a reciprocating saw. The reward for winning this contest (let’s say the contest was “the one who is most impressionable” or “the one who for some reason has memorized all the cuts of beef at 8”) was two-fold. First, I got a free Little Caesars pizza for lunch. Second, I got to pick one person to eat with, privately, at our own table. And you are right to guess that I chose Kevin, and his Umbros, and his leg hair, and his assumed carpentry skills.

To fathom this scenario is impossible for any age past the third grade: the quiet kid (who, later in fourth grade, would go on to win Class Clown) picking the coolest guy in the school to share a private lunch. I wasn’t really friends with Kevin; he was just cool, and no one yet fully understood societal organization. After third grade, though, people divide. Packs emerge. The guy in the Umbros becomes the jock with the letter jacket; the cute girl with dorky glasses morphs into a hot cheerleader with Acuvue once-dailies, and guys like me never talk to either one of them again.

I can remember the reaction of the class as I stood up front to claim my prize and announce to everyone that, indeed, I had chosen none of them and would be sharing a pepperoni pizza at a private table with the best person in the class and perhaps even the United States. It wasn’t the loss of eating pizza that saddened them; it was the failure to be chosen as cool. There were moans of disappointment. There was an “aw shucks” motion from many arms. And then there was Kevin, sitting in his stackable plastic yellow chair, slowly pulling his fist down from the sky, clenching his jaw and exclaiming, proudly, “Yes!”

We moved around a lot growing up, so I have no idea of Kevin’s whereabouts or societal status. I don’t even recall his last name to look him up and figure out whether he’s still cool; or deduce whether he went through a domineering jock phase and is maybe cool once again; or simply, after third grade, conclude that he turned into an insufferable prick and perhaps crashed his Audi through a guardrail, causing it to burst into flames and fly uncontrollably into a spinning wind turbine.

I’d like to believe Kevin is still cool and didn’t suffer a horrific death, and that, if we ever met again, we’d sit down and share a pepperoni pizza together. Anything except Little Caesars, which is gross now.