Poop Shute

Wow. It feels like years since I last sat down to do this. Weird.

Sorry I haven't finished the party story yet. I'm sound-designing for Pinnochio at VYT, and acting in Complete Works of Shakepeare (abridged), and all my friends are currently living at my house, so... I haven't had a lot of that stuff. What's it again? Oh yeah: time and energy.

I have had some of that stuff, but I keep spending it everywhere else, so by the time I get here I'm flat broke and can't afford the price of admission. I beg and plead, but Blogger just won't let me in.

Sigh.

So, without further doo doo, the party finale:

Part III

In the latter part of the night the power went out. Or so we all thought. Me and a couple guys got a flash-light and went to check the breaker box. All of them had been flipped. Hmmm.... Seemed kinda fishy.

When we got them flipped back, and went back inside everyone discovered things missing. Four or five girls' purses were gone, some of the hard liquor was taken, and like five of my CD's.

Again, it wasn't until much later the mystery would be solved. Brian was on the baseball team at our high school with a guy named Jay Gjurgevich. One day Jay was bragging about this caper he was so proud of. Turns out he and some other guys flipped the breakers off and took off with all that stuff under cover of darkness. I feel bad for the girls and their purses, but I would have loved to have seen their faces when they saw what they blindly grabbed from my CD collection.

The following were missing:

Mozart
Beethoven
Goo Goo Dolls - A Boy Named Goo
Soul Asylum - Hang Time (1988)

These guys were pretty much into rap and r&b exclusively, so I don't imagine they were too thrilled with their haul that night. The funniest one to me is the Soul Asylum. I didn't even like that album, and they were my favorite band at the time. There was one other CD missing, but the title escapes me. I do remember that it was not the obvious choice for these guys.

Morons.

Finally, the night ended around 3:30 am when I decided that all these people needed to get the hell out. There was a large line dance to Quad City DJ's Come and Ride The Train going around the living room. I was drunk and tired, and wanted to go to bed... after my friends and I cleaned up the HUGE mess we made.

The line dance was disbanded and sent on their way.

The unfortunate thing was we not only did our cleaning drunk, but we also did it while it was still dark outside. That will be important in a minute. Somewhere between 4 and 5 we left for Brian's thinking we were done.

The next morning I stopped in to see how we did.

Not good. Not good at all.

The tile floor that ran from the kitchen to the front door was sticky as hell from a thin coating of spilled beer and wine coolers. And we're not talking just a little sticky, we're talking it took effort to lift your shoe off of it. I tried to wipe it up, and thought I had done a pretty good job, but after my parents got home I would see I had changed nothing with my mopping.

Also there was a rancid beer stench in the air. I opened all the windows and even emptied three cans of Lysol into the house, and it was still slightly there.

Even if I had been able to get rid of the stickyness and the stench, I was boned anyway. If only I had taken a second to go look around the backyard by daylight I would have seen what really nailed me to the wall.

Hundreds and hundreds of cigarette butts and beer bottle caps were lying among the gravel of the yard. We had been out there picking up empties in the dark, but didn't see all the little things strewn about.

That about wraps it up. That Saturday evening when my parents got home they grilled me and yelled at me for the better part of an hour. My Dad had gone all around the house making a list of the damages. Sixty bucks. They demanded I pay them back. Fine, I had a job. No big deal. I suppose it made them feel better. I sat there and took it all stone-faced. I made no excuse. I didn't whimper, or cry, and I made no apologies. Looking back, I'll bet that's why they threw me out, but the fact was I wasn't sorry. I had a great time, and I would do it all over again if I could.

I did feel bad about the mess, but the great thing about a mess is it cleans up. It goes away. My punishment was two-pronged. Prong one: all day Sunday (and I mean ALL day) they had me cleaning, scrubbing, picking up garbage, and prong two: I was to be grounded for a month.

At the end of this month they demanded my Mom take me to live with her.

You can clean away the mess, but the scars left on the relationship still haven't gone away. Unfortunately for me, my stepmom is what I call a score-keeper. I don't think she'll ever fully forgive me for this one. My relationship with my dad has improved a lot over the passed year or two, but it will never be what it was when I was a kid.

Him and I both made sure of that. Through both deed and word.