Everyone has an off day occasionally, right? I mean, it's inevitable'� the stars align just so, someone's parked in front of your driveway when you are ready to set off for work, the toilet backs up.. whatever. Some seemingly random chain of events just leads you to say to yourself, 'Fuck me, I don't know if I could take another one of THOSE for a while.'� Well, Shale and I sometimes liked to tinker with the stars, so to speak, in the hopes of stumbling into just such a day so that we could see just HOW bad it could actually get.
So one day a couple of years ago, Shale drove up for a visit. It had been a long time since we'd spent any serious time together (since his wedding, in fact, when I stole a bunch of paperweights from the printing shop that had done his invitations because.. well, because they were assholes, actually) and we'd both decided that it was high time for a blowout. So we designated a weekend and made plans for him to come up for a couple of days of revelry and mischief.
He arrived. We unloaded the car, had a short bit of pleasant small talk about the drive and my'� erm'� fluffy goth girlfriend (who'd been there when he pulled up but who'd been elbowed out the door shortly thereafter), and then Shale got right down to business.
'Ok, so where's the drugs?'�
'Drugs?'�
'Fuck, man, I want to do this RIGHT. What kind of drugs can you get?'�
'Ummm, well, I've got some pot.'�
'Bollocks.'�
'Yeah, well'� we can always get a case of Sierra Nevada, it's cheap here.'�
'Fucking double-bollocks! Where's the speed in this town? Where's the acid? Don't tell me that you don't know where to pick any of this shit up! You're'� well, you're YOU, man. Make some calls.'�
'Shale, I'� I don't really do that shit anymore. The speed was just bad news, and if I know where to get it, I'll probably be tempted to, well, to get it. A lot.'�
'Shit. Let's go downtown.'�
I could see him working. Downtown was our best bet if we were looking for a random drug hookup. Even in a small town like this, you could occasionally stumble across a stray freak who was holding, and Shale and I had a fairly finely tuned sense of drug-dar. So we wandered the yuppified streets with our mental dishes turning, pinging, searching for that strike of fortune.
Nothing. Not a sausage. A far cry from the old days when I had friends who would leave a pound of the shit in the shed out back because they knew they could trust me not to fuck with it or them'� partially because they also broke off a sixteenth for my personal use while I was acting as 'caretaker', but also because I was just a pretty decent guy, as inveterate drug fiends go.
In time, Shale and I realized that we were really striking out, truly not being smiled upon by the gods of drug traffic'� so we did the only reasonable thing that we could think of. We went to the stationary store and bought two bottles of rubber cement.
Now, I don't know about you, but for me, rubber cement is the poor man's nitrous oxide. N2O is, indeed, hippie crack. My co-workers and I once boosted a case of nitrous boxes (each containing 24 little canisters, three canisters equaling an IMMENSE high for one person'� so with at least 20 boxes in the case, that's one hell of a lot of staggering around) and had an informal employee party. I managed to be the highlight of the evening when I took an enormous hit while kneeling, held it for a bit, then stood up and started jumping up and down until the world went really gray and nimbus. The next thing I remember is seeing 35 or so people swirling around in my field of vision (there were only seven of us at the party) and hearing garbled inquiries about my state of mind. I tried to tell them that I felt FUCKING GREAT, but the words were transposed into something like, 'Grzbow MOOLICK sunqyoo foo,'� on the way out. Evidently, during my 'down time', I'd reeled around the room like a lazy-eyed top, knocking down lit candles and random artwork, before dropping to the ground and jittering as if I was having a massive seizure.
Rubber cement, on the other hand, is a much more lowbrow high. Shale and I used to put it in sandwich baggies and sit on my front porch when I lived on the outskirts of Frat town, and then wait for groups of nitwits to weave by on their way home. When we saw some of them coming, we'd huff up a huge lungful of fumes and then invent and sing entertaining circus songs to accompany our victims' drunken walking styles.
So the first night of our glorious blowout weekend was spent drinking beer and whiskey and huffing glue as we watched Jackass, South Park, and Dancing Outlaw.
The next morning, everything was somewhat hazy and unfocused. Not even a wakeup beer really snapped things back into their proper places, so Shale suggested that we go up to Bear Hole for a little swim. Now, for the uninitiated, my little town has one of the best parks in the country. For all of Chico's shortcomings, and it has a lot, trust me, having access to Bidwell Park is an enormous perk. It's actually something like the second or third largest city park in the US, and it's arguably the best, in terms of sheer beauty and relative wildness.
We donned our swimsuits and made for the hills, grinning like idiots with heads the size of pumpkins (an unfortunate after-effect of the whole rubber cement thing. We probably also had a weird little sticky ring around our mouths, but neither of us was looking to get laid, so I suppose that didn't really matter much either). Once we got to the parking area, we locked up, grabbed our shit, and started up the trail.
I should probably pull back for a second and give you an idea of what I'm talking about here. Bidwell Park is essentially a long strip of undeveloped hill country surrounding a creek that cuts through a bunch of volcanic-type formations. It is beautiful, wooded, rugged, and raw. The park gets thicker and thinner and winds about, it has mountain bike trails, horse trails, hiking trails, and other stuff, but the main focus is the creek. There are many little trails that lead down to the creek, and many places that various people consider to be 'their' spot, but we were headed for OUR spot'� so to speak.
'Our' spot is where the daredevils go for a bit of time off from the really extreme sport thing. There's a nice big rock to jump off of (about 15 feet above the water) and then a cliff-face to scale and jump from (about 35 feet above the water). When we got there, the only other people there was a group of three or four boys in their early teens.
Shale and I jumped off of the rock a couple of times, and then he went over to climb the cliff. Since I lack ANY depth perception, my relationship with climbing rocks is somewhat.. shaky. It's not the height that I'm afraid of, really, it's the fact that I can't tell how high up I am or how far down my last foothold was. So if I do get into trouble, not only will I have no idea where I should put my foot to get down, but I also have absolutely no idea of how far I'm about to plummet if I miss my toehold. So I made my way back to the top of the rock and waited for him to get to the jumping off point.
By this time, Shale had quit trying to cajole me into climbing up with him, both because he knows that there's no way that he can shame me into it and because he's seen me do enough crazy shit that he knows it's not really a lack of nerve that keeps me off of the cliffs. In fact, he and I used to go a bit further upstream where there are several huge blocks of lava in the stream with weird little caves running under them (and thus, under the water) and we'd just sort of, explore. This is an extremely effective way to die if you make even one mistake, because the current, closeness of quarters, lack of any breathing apparatus, low visibility, and unpredictability of the caves themselves all conspire to do their best to render you into a non-breathing, cold piece of fish-bait.
Once he got to the 'leaping ledge', he sat down and started gathering his nerve. This leap is not necessarily easy, for several reasons. To start with, there is really no room for a run-up, but you have to leap a fair distance out from the wall if you don't want to wind up with a pair of broken legs and a crushed spine. On the other hand, you can't leap TOO far, because then you'll end up hitting one of the rocks lurking below the surface or landing in the shallows, which will net you another pair of broken legs and that same potential crushed spinal column. It's not cliff-diving in Acapulco, but there is a definite element of risk involved.
When he'd been up there for about ten minutes, I started to harangue him'� after all, if he did wind up dying, I wanted him to remember me in the context that we'd both become fairly comfortable with: vaguely adversarial and provocative.
Finally, he jumped, and I cheered when his head popped up and it wasn't surrounded by a bloom of blood and bone-chips. Oddly, he didn't even spare me a glance, much less the usual celebratory fist pump. He just made a beeline for the shore, clambered up, and started walking very quickly toward the trailhead.
'Hold on, man, what's up?'� I asked.
'I'll be right back. Just hang out for a second,'� he replied, still speed-walking up the trail.
Ok, I thought, whatever. I sat down and started musing about what kind of freakish impression I might be making on the boys who were still wandering around in the periphery. I took a quick personal inventory and found myself somewhat wanting. Two or three days of stubble? Check. Deranged wandering eye? Check. Vague, weird looking ring of mystery goo around my mouth? Check. Jesus. I must look like a potential molester, here.
I sat with that thought for a few minutes, alternately chuckling to myself and feeling appalled with myself, until I began to wonder just where Shale was and what the fuck he was up to. After waiting for about ten minutes, I gathered up our stuff and started to go after him up the trail. Suddenly I heard a sharp whistle from downstream and Shale said, 'Hey! Down here! Come down here!'�
What the hell? Oh well. I shrugged inwardly, turned, and clambered out over the rocks, into the creek and met him.
'Here's your towel,'� I said as I handed it to him, 'what's up?'�
'I just think we should take this trail a little bit downstream.'�
'Ok.'�
We walked along in silence for a while, but by the time we were halfway up his alternate route, the whole situation just struck me as really odd.
'Alright, Shale, just what the fuck is going on here? Why couldn't I just go up the trail we took down in the first place? Why this detour?'�
'Fuck,'� he sighed. 'Listen, when I jumped off of that cliff, as soon as I hit the water, I had to shit like you wouldn't believe. So I was running up the trail to go to the porta-potty when it just let loose. I mean, I shit myself, I shit the trail, I just shit EVERYWHERE. There's no WAY you wanted to go back up that trail.'� He paused for a second, then said, 'Man, there's no way I'll ever be able to tell Dana about this.'� Dana is his wife.
'You told her about the squirrel, right?'� I asked.
'Yeah, but this is just'� different, you know? Besides, that was years ago.'�
'I guess.'�
I promised not to tell her and we drove back into town where he stripped off the shorts, threw them in a corner of my living room, and promptly forgot about them. We spent the rest of the day wandering around town, eating burgers with blue cheese on them, and talking about old times. We both came to the agreement that our revelry of the previous night had pretty much taken the piss out of us, so we decided to have a fairly quiet night at my house with a few beers and perhaps some video games. Sweet Christ if that's not the problem with Shale and I: our best intentions almost always lead us down some very dark and daunting paths.
The night was progressing pretty much as we'd envisioned it for a while. We drank some beers and kicked back. By our own standards, we were being very moderate. For example, a number of years ago, Shale was living in Chico and I was living elsewhere'� essentially detoxing from a wicked bout of drug abuse that nearly destroyed my life. After being away for about two months, I was presented with the chance to pay a visit to Chico, somewhat unexpectedly, so I called Shale and told him that I'd probably stop by at some point while I was in town.
Once I got to town, I spent a number of hours reeling about from bar to bar, slapping backs and pissing people off, until it was 2 AM and everyone was converging on the sidewalks to figure out what should happen next. I was standing there with my ride, chatting, turned my back for a second to say hi to someone else I knew, and when I turned back around, my ride and all of her friends were a block away in a taxi. So I did the only reasonable thing: I set out for Shale's house on foot.
I arrived at about three in the morning, expecting to piss him off by waking him up, but when I knocked, the door opened almost immediately and he said, 'Fuck, I wondered when you were going to show up. I've got a case of Weinhard's Ice in the fridge, let's DRINK.'� And we did. After a while, it seemed wise to break out the potato gun and shoot it at his car, which we did. In the morning (well, when we got up, sometime after noon), he was pissed off that someone had hit his car during the night, at least until I pointed out the big spray of starch in the middle of the blemish.
'Oh, yeah,'� he muttered, flicking idly at the shreds of potato skin that were still clinging to the fender. 'Shit, did we shoot anything else?'�
Before we passed out, we polished off the beer and were in the process of finding his cheap flask of brandy so we could have a drink and watch the sun rise when suddenly I felt my gorge rising. 'Great,'� I said, belching, 'I'll be right back. Hold that thought.'� I stumbled into the bathroom and had one of those really cleansing, epiphany type of vomit moments where everything that you've even thought about ingesting for the past 72 hours leaps out of you, each item elbowing the others in their haste to be FREE.
When I'd finished, I walked back into the living room to find Shale packing everything up.
'What the fuck?'� I asked, indignant. 'I thought we were going to have some brandy and watch the sun rise.'�
'What? You want more? I thought I just heard your SHOES coming out of your mouth in there, and you want more?'�
'Come on, fucker, we're not even close to done,'� I replied, snatching the bottle away from him before he could put it back in the cupboard.
He shook his head, stunned for a moment and then said, 'This just isn't natural.'�
In retrospect, perhaps the brandy wasn't such a wise idea, because after we passed out, I evidently decided, in my sleep, that I needed to strip off my pants and attempt to wash them on the kitchen floor. Shale woke me up by yelling, 'What the FUCKING HELL is all this water doing on the floor? Jesus fucking Christ, there's like, eight gallons down here. And whose pants are these?'�
When compared to that kind of baseline, our indulgence on the night after our whisky/beer/glue festival was extraordinarily mild, which makes it harder to account for what wound up happening.
It started when we began smacking each other on the back of the head. It's something that we've done throughout our friendship at various times, but occasionally it just really pisses Shale off. He wound up getting so pissed that he actually tried to hit me in the head with a glass bowl filled with macaroni and cheese. He missed, but the bowl shattered on the floor and I spent the next several months finding stray little desiccated macaroni bits and shards of glass in various corners of the room.
Confronted by this type of escalation, we both generally knew it was time to back off and dial it down a bit. Well, we tried, in this case, but failed miserably. I suppose it should be said that I tried but failed miserably.
Two days prior to Shale's visit, my girlfriend had bought a tub of 'Nads'�. For those of you who are unaware, Nads is a very unfortunately named hair removal product. I'd first seen it advertised late at night on some fringe cable channel, and I'd been tickled by the fact that they kept saying 'Nads'� over and over again. Granted, the inventor was from Australia, but my thought was, 'didn't these people do even a TINY bit of market research? I mean, a hair removal product with the same name as a slang term for male genitalia is just.. self-parody'.
Anyway, the g/f had gotten some, and I'd asked her to 'Nads' my chest. Bad idea, all around. It's supposedly organic and all natural, but whatever was in it made my chest break out in weird little bumps. It did remove the hair, yeah, but it hurt like shit and it left me with all of those blemishes.
Well, Shale and I had an ongoing and longstanding agreement that chest hair is pretty much just disgusting. It's not manly, it's not studly, it's pretty much repulsive and unnecessary. Thus, it made some sense that I started taunting him with the newly hairless state of my chest.
'Look at this, Shale,'� I said, pulling up my shirt, 'I'm all clean and hairless, and you're a dirty, hairy pig.'�
'Fuck you.'�
'Mmmmm,'� I said, rubbing my chest, 'hairless'� clean. Aren't you ashamed of how filthy and hairy you are?'�
'Fine, then get out the Nads.'�
'I don't have it. Andra took it with her.'�
'Fine. Then burn it off. You do have Ronsonol, don't you?'�
''�Yeah'� buuuut..'�
'But WHAT? Go get it.'�
'Ok.'�
Since I lived in a 1 bedroom efficiency, the lighter fluid was not far away, and neither was the lighter. Shale stripped his shirt off and stood in front of me.
'Alright, spray it on.'�
*squirt* *squirt*
'Do it,'� he said, with a steely glint in his eye.
Right. So it is at this point that common sense should kick in. You're standing in front of your friend, who is covered in lighter fluid that you just squirted on him, holding a lighter and considering setting him alight. Well, it turns out that common sense isn't nearly as common as people would like to believe.
*FOOM* Shale went up like a dry Christmas tree. I could tell that he instantly regretted the decision to actually spark the flame, because he first swiped frantically at his chest with his hands (as the flames leapt up and singed his goatee) and then dropped to the floor to extinguish himself. This left a Shale shaped scorch mark in the carpet that I was hard pressed to explain to the landlord when I moved out.
'Fuck, shit, hell, FUCK!'� he screamed, scrambling for the shower. There wasn't actually much in the way of coherent conversation after that, aside from repeated observations from both of us that what had just happened was a really bad idea, period.
In the morning, Shale woke up and looked down at the damage that had been done. It didn't look good, at all. He wound up going to the doctor after he got home, but for now he was concerned about more immediate issues.
'Fuck. There's no way I'll be able to hide this from Dana. Just no way.'�
'You're right, man. Shit.'� We sat and pondered the reality of what was to come. I knew that at the very least, I'd be on Dana's shit list for the foreseeable future, if not forever. Shale insisted that he'd make it clear to her that it was as much his idea as it was mine, but that didn't sound very reassuring.
We worried the problem a bit more, and finally I said, 'Ok. I'll tell you what you should do. Start out by telling her about how you shit your pants in the park, you know, get her laughing, and then just slip the second degree burn thing in while she's amused. Maybe it'll soften the blow.'�
'Soften the blow? Are you out of your mind? She's going to freak out no matter what I tell her. Fuck. I've got to go home.'�
And he did. After a couple more rounds of 'that really didn't turn out the way we thought it would, now did it?', we packed his stuff up, put it in the car, and I watched him pull off into the early afternoon haze, knowing that this would probably be the last unsupervised visit that we would ever have with one another.
A few weeks later, I stumbled across Shale's swim trunks in my living room. I needed something to wear, so I threw them on and hopped on my bike to run some errands. The last task that I had to finish before going home was to swing by my girlfriend's house to feed, water, and check up on her cat. She was out of town, you see, and I'd agreed to feed kitty during her absence.
In the middle of doing this, I was suddenly struck by the most dire, pressing need to shit that I'd felt in a very long time. As a matter of fact, the last time I'd felt this urgent a need to shit had happened several years previously, when I was living with Shale. I was walking home from a bar crawl when I felt an insistent poo knocking at my back door. I shuffled homeward, pausing occasionally to dance around and pinch my ass cheeks together, streaming sweat and cursing the lack of public facilities, until I reached my porch. I opened the door, started making a mad dash for the inner door, fumbling with the buttons on my pants, and then just let go. *BWOMP*.
'Well,' I thought to myself, 'at least I don't have to worry about that THIS time, because there's a bathroom right over there.' I walked into the bathroom, looked around, and realized that there was not a scrap of toilet paper in it. In fact, there wasn't a scrap of paper in it, period. Actually, as I desperately scanned the rest of the apartment, I saw that there wasn't any paper anywhere, at all. No newspaper, no paper towels, no stray napkins from fast food (and, not to be catty, but at her weight, I'd at least expect that there'd be some fast food napkins in my girlfriend's house), NOTHING.
'This is a woman's house, right?'� I asked rhetorically, and then I jumped on my bike. At first I thought that I would go to the nearest fast food outlet (ironically, a Taco Bell). When I got there, though, I saw that they'd recently instituted a 'pay for play' system in the rest room department. Buy some food, get a token that allows you access to the facilities. At this point, the last thing I needed was a fucking burrito, so I jumped back on the bike and pedaled my soon-to-be-leaking ass home.
I made it, barely. As I sat on the throne, I looked down at the shorts that I'd been wearing and realized that they were probably haunted by some sort of shitetergeist, an evil diarrhea spirit with a wicked sense of timing and an utter disregard for social structure.
'Oh well,' I thought, 'we have that in common, I guess.'

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