I Drank a Gallon of Water a Day for a Week - Here’s What Happened

Introduction

What follows is a work of fiction. All characters, situations, observations, and insinuations are fictitious, coincidental, or accidental. The characters were pulled out of thin air and have nothing in common with any human being who ever lived, nor any zombie or otherwise undead individual. Nothing that happens in this story ever happened to a real person, or ever will. In fact, this story is practically science fiction, except that it’s totally unscientific and doesn’t have spaceships or aliens or anything. That said, any similarity of any character to an actual space alien, past present or future, is (obviously) purely coincidental or conjectural.

I drank a gallon of water every day for a week – here’s what happened

I was casting about for a New Year’s Resolution but nothing was coming to mind. Last year I resolved to dance like nobody’s watching, and I even bought a new Bluetooth speaker, but I found the dancing made me sad, because I live alone and there was nobody to watch me. A one-man dance party doesn’t feel much like self improvement.

So this year I decided to try drinking a gallon of water a day. Supposedly hydration is really important, and after all, what have I got to lose? Because I’m in an apartment building, my water bill is the same no matter what I do.

I thought about buying one of those graduated gallon water bottles with motivational phrases on them—you know, starting at the top with “GOOD MORNING” then “HYDRATE YOURSELF” then “REMEMBER YOUR GOAL,” etc., down to “ALMOST FINISHED” and then finally “YOU DID IT” at the bottom—but then I’m like dang, that’s $25 I’d rather not spend. Plus, I know myself, and I respond better to the whip than the carrot, if you catch my drift. So I washed out an empty gallon milk jug and wrote on it with a sharpie:

7AM GET COFFEE
9AM NO EXCUSES
11AM THIS IS NOTHING
1PM DON’T BE A LOSER
3PM NO PITY PARTY
5PM OOH, BIG MAN
7PM EVERYONE GETS A RIBBON
9PM BIG WHOOP

I set everything out the night before, feeling pretty excited. I hadn’t felt such keen anticipation since I started charging my new Bluetooth speaker at about this time last year.

Day One

At 9am I filled my big jug and then poured about a pint of it into my teakettle. This is the hardest part since there’s some sloshing and trial-and-error involved but I think it’s the genius of my method. See, others who do this drink only out of their $25 graduated jug and drag it around with them, like wearing a badge of honor so everyone will ask about it and they can start taking credit for their awesome resolution in advance. That’s not for me, I don’t need to brag. Plus, I don’t need the ruggedness of the Motivational Bottle … I don’t worry about leaks since I’m mostly at home. When I go out I’ll fill some smaller, more reliable vessel from the main one and then return for refills.

Some say it’s bad to hydrate with coffee but if I gave that up, I’d be doing two New Year’s Resolutions and I don’t want to boil the ocean here. I’m trying to tackle something I can actually achieve, so as to be more compassionate with myself (my Resolution from two years ago that I’m still struggling to keep).

Well, things were going fine until about 11am, when I’d peed so many times I felt like I was wearing out the carpet between my armchair and the toilet. I was peeing so much it seemed like the bowl would be completely full by nightfall. I’m of the “if it’s yellow keep it mellow, if it’s brown wash it down” school, in terms of flushing, except “keep it mellow” never made sense—I mean, what’s non-mellow about flushing? So I think of it as “if it’s brown, flush it down, if it’s jaune leave it alone.” (I am considering putting that on a placard above the toilet, with a little translation of “jaune” from the French.)

Just to divert my mind from the constant awareness of my pestering bladder, I went to the park and sat at my favorite bench for a while, watching life go by, and then this man came up to me, sat down, and said, “Hey, are you one of the dads?” I was like, “No,” and he said, “So you just like sitting and watching kids on a playground?” and I just stared at him, like, isn’t that obvious? He went on to say, “Look, a couple of other parents and I have talked about this and we all agree, we’re gonna have to ask you to leave.” So I shot back, “I was leaving anyway, I have to pee!” I have to admit, it was nice to have a really good comeback for once.

In terms of the more tangible benefits of all this drinking, I have to say that by 9pm, I’d never felt so good. My skin seemed better, I felt stronger in my body, my posture was more erect … even my hair felt better. Totally worth all the peeing.

Day Two

My bladder woke me up from a dream in which I was touring this old Victorian mansion that they’d turned into a museum, and I had to pee (yes, even in my dream) and found this tiny little half-bathroom, but instead of a toilet it just had a little portal to pee into. Halfway through my business the whole room started to move, slowly lowering toward the ground floor, and I realized it wasn’t a bathroom, it was an elevator! Yikes! I was like, “When I reach the next floor, the door’s gonna open and I’d better be finished!” Then I woke up.

The drinking itself was still pretty easy today and I nailed the pour into my teakettle, first try. If anything the constant peeing was even worse, though, and beyond that, by lunchtime I started getting pretty bored of drinking plain water. I’d been warned by drink-a-gallon-a-day websites not to have any sugar, though, because it’d throw off my electrolytes. Then I realized hey, if I make Top Ramen soup and drink the broth, that’s two cups of water right there! So I did that.

Big mistake! OMG, all the salt in that ramen totally bloated me! I should have known! Salt is an electrolyte! I stood in the mirror looking in horror at my bloated (and unfortunately hairy) belly (though not hairy due to drinking water, I hasten to add). I looked kind of like ET. Out of habit, I also scrutinized my face in the mirror, and as I looked closer I realized hey, my eyebrows are looking good! I flicked them with my finger a few times and realized, wow, drinking all this water has totally cured my eyebrow dandruff! Bonus!

All the afternoon water drinking eventually brought down the bloat, and after my final 9pm pint—nailed it!—I was ready for some yoga. I put in my video and (literally) went through the motions. I still can’t even come close to the Yogi Squat, but it’s only the second day of my new hydration regimen.

Day Three

I have hit my stride. The more I drink water now, the more I love it. In fact I doubled up on my 9am pint, drinking a whole quart, and it felt so good. I paid a price, though: I immediately had to pee, and then afterward, the sensation of water on my hands as I washed them made me have to pee again immediately, and for a second it looked like a vicious cycle I’d never break out of.

I went for a little hike and had to pee so bad halfway through. Alas, the outhouse at the trailhead was still at least thirty minutes away, which was like two pees worth, and there were so many hikers! I couldn’t find any privacy! I bushwhacked off-trail for a bit, and then my sneakers lost traction and I slid down into this ravine, and at the bottom I discovered—to my shock and horror—a dead body! It looked like some young adult hiker, halfway claimed by the earth. I scrambled up that slope so fast I couldn’t believe it. Surely my excellent hydration gave me wings. Problem was, just before reaching the trail again I slid on some leaves and tumbled all the way back down there. Then I looked more closely at the body and realized it was just an old shirt tangled around a fallen tree limb. Silly me.

Day Four

Another peeing dream woke me up and for a terrifying moment I thought I’d wet the bed. But I hadn’t … just a little leakage which is totally normal when you drink a gallon of water a day.

In addition to the better skin, relief from back pain, and higher energy, all of which I’d secretly hoped this hydration would give me, I got a big surprise: I got a job! My first in years! It’s selling tickets at the Events Center. The ticket window opens hours before the game and things start off really slow, so peeing wasn’t a problem at first—I’d just put the “BACK IN 5 MINUTES” sign out and go do my business. But once the rush started, no dice. I could not leave my post. It got worse and worse to where people were asking, “Are you okay!?” I guess my face was getting contorted. But then I realized I could just pee in this wastebasket without even getting out of my seat! Don’t worry, the wastebasket has a liner. All the wadded-up paper napkins in there dampen the sound down to almost nothing. I did have to sit pretty far forward in my chair to, well, eclipse everything, but nobody was the wiser.

Now, if you think I’m trying to connect the dots between drinking water and getting a job, I totally am. Those may seem unrelated but if I hadn’t been so hydrated, I wouldn’t have had the confidence to accept the offer.

The health benefits continue. I did an experiment: I looked in the mirror, located a zit, studied my face carefully to remember exactly where it was, drank a pint of water, and then looked again. Sure enough, the zit was gone! Water is like a miracle elixir!

Day Five

Other gallon-a-day blogs had warned me that I’d get bored of drinking water. Well, so far they’re wrong, but you know what is boring? All this peeing! It’s getting so old! Also, even though practice normally improves one’s prowess at practically anything, I seem to be getting worse at not spattering the rim. Either that, or I’m just more observant. I have to mop up the rim pretty much every time now. And my hands are starting to get a bit raw from all that washing, like with OCD people. The rest of my skin is positively glowing from all the water, but for some reason not my hands. I was reading on this one blog about smearing lotion on my hands and then putting on disposable rubber gloves, right before bed, so I’m considering that.

I showed up to work today but nobody was there. I searched everywhere and finally found my supervisor, and it turns out I misunderstood about the job: it’s not a daily thing, but only as needed, when they have a big game and somebody calls in sick. Oh well. I have a small passive income and it’s better to focus on my blogging anyway.

I fell asleep today and had one of those marathon naps where it’s hard to move afterward, so I missed one of my drinking sessions. I chugged a quart after that and was back on track.

Day Six

Not so much to report, actually. Drinking water, even a gallon a day, turns out to not actually be that complicated. One highlight: the hydration is helping my vision. If I really squint, I can read the kitchen clock from the kitchen nook table without my glasses.

Day Seven

This has gone so well, I woke up this morning thinking about continuing my gallon-a-day habit for the whole month, or more. This would give me a good blog topic while continuing to improve my health in umpteen different ways! But I’ve also been thinking a lot about the new Avatar movie, which is over three hours long. I really want to see it in the theater, and I’m sure the crowds have thinned out by now, but there’s no way I could make it through without getting up to pee at least six times. Who knows how many plot points I’d miss. And I’ve been looking forward to this movie for a long, long time.

And that got me thinking that, just like with last year’s dancing, achieving this Resolution is making me a little sad. Why, you may ask? Well, at some point I’ll have reaped all the health benefits, and then I’ll have nothing left to look forward to. So I think after I polish off my last pint tonight, I’ll call it quits, and keep the optimal hydration project in my back pocket for later. It’ll be like my ace-in-the-hole, my Plan B, the card up my sleeve. Next time I’m feeling really low, I’ll just start back up the gallon-a-day, and things will start to get real, real good again!

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Further reading

• New Year’s Resolutions
• One-Size-Fits-All New Year’s Resolution
• New Year’s Resolutions - Dental Hygiene Edition
• New Year’s Resolutions - Let’s Get It Right This Time
• A Wide Net Approach to New Year’s Resolutions
• The DUMB Approach to New Year’s Resolutions

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From the Archives - This Is a Short Story—NOT!

Introduction

When I’ve lately searched my archives for an old essay worth posting, it’s felt like I’m down to the absolute dregs. One thing I’m resolute about sparing you are the short stories I wrote during high school, which are painful to read. The following essay, which I wrote in college, examines the difficulty I had with fiction, while sharing some personal history I hope you’ll find amusing.

This Is a Short Story - October 21, 1989

This is a short story.

Actually, it’s not. It’s just another ... well, whatever you want to call it. Essay, report, letter: whatever it is, it ain’t fiction. A family member reported recently getting shivers when reading about my life, and wishing it was fiction. Hey, if my memoirs make you uneasy, you should read my short stories! Or maybe you shouldn’t.

See, I’ve always had problems with fiction. A few years back, I could write it pretty readily—but it was really, really bad. My characters were either boring, unbelievable, or undeveloped. The situations were worse. Real life provides all this for me; I just have to write it all down. The only trouble is, I have to patiently wait for characters to show up and situations to happen, which takes too long … unless I delve into my past.

I’m probably the only 20-year-old alive who’s ready to write his autobiography. I could write a new volume every twenty years until I’m dead. So instead of the story I was going to try to write this evening, here are some reminisces.

 At my high school, most students hung out in packs (I’d say “cliques” but that’s such a stupid word). Within these groups, everybody tried to look like everybody else, so most of my peers in high school could be easily categorized: jock, egghead, stoner, hic, punker, cheerleader, reject, etc. I always had a strange fascination, almost an admiration, for those who took great pains to distinguish themselves and stand aloof from everyone. Take this guy in my Russian class, Timofey. That’s not really his name, but it’s the English phonetic spelling for his Russian name. Outside of class, he probably went by “Tim” which doesn’t fit him nearly as well. Who knows, maybe he adopted “Timofey” beyond the classroom … I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

Timofey made punk rockers look like Eddie Haskell. He wore this black leather jacket with a painting on the back of a pit bull with an arm sticking out of its mouth. Big block letters spelled out, “Pit bull for sale: loves children.” As you read that, it sounds stupid. And it was. But the fact that he wore that thing, without copping any kind of rebellious attitude, was unique. Unlike punkers, he was friendly and outgoing. His hair was even wilder than his jacket: a kind of square shaped, white ‘do with little vertical curls set in epoxy. I’m not kidding, epoxy—I asked. He was really funny not just to talk to, but to look at. He might have been smart; I couldn’t tell (though it was said that he was the first Russian language student in 20 years to fail the class). 

I guess the real reason I kind of respected the guy was that he wasn’t trying to relate to the punkers—in fact, they wouldn’t go near him. Where you would expect them to look at him with awe, their expressions seemed to say something like, “Gawd, that guy’s WEIRD!” He singlehandedly made their own poses look pretty weak; after all, most of these rote punkers would have cleaned up just fine and could be installed in a church service pretty readily. But not Timofey. I mean, how do you get hardened epoxy out of a kid’s hair?

When I started high school I was as judgmental and easily shocked as the next rank-and-file member of the nerdy wannabe-elite. Having Timofey in class, and finding him harmless, helped me let my guard down. I was also led toward greater acceptance of the unusual by this punk rocker chick named (in Russian) Masha. She had this way of looking at you with a half-smile, curling her lip like Billy Idol, as though she was kind of inwardly laughing at you, except you knew she wasn’t even paying attention to you, so she must have been laughing at everyone, at this class, at this whole stupid high school scene. I had a sizeable crush on Masha, even if her bleached, gelled, and shocked-up hair wasn’t set in epoxy. My only issue with her is that she almost never came to class.

So, yeah, exchanging pleasantries with Timofey and Masha (yes, they’d actually talk to me!) really expanded my worldview, to the point that when my brothers’ friend DT began an eerie metamorphosis into an unrecognizable hybrid of comic book villain and standup comedian, I rolled with it. He stopped wearing bike race t-shirts in favor of a big long overcoat, which accentuated his 6’4” 200-pound frame (which was itself a recent thing—he seemed to suddenly grow giant overnight). DT dyed his hair red—but not a realistic redhead red, but a lustrous dark black-cherry-red right out of a color comic book. Then he wore the old-school Steve Dallas sunglasses, let a good three days of razor stubble build up on his face, and clenched a cigar in his teeth. Maybe you never saw him like that, and if not it’s probably a good thing. You would’ve hated it, probably, because this was DT, a guy we all knew, a guy we didn’t want to laugh at like a strange exhibit from the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not museum. How are you supposed to hang out with a guy who looks like that?

To engage with DT and his new look took some adjustment. After all, he didn’t create that image so he could blend into the woodwork. He wanted to be noticed, to call attention to himself, just like the young rebel teen punk who sports a foot high blue mohawk and a studded collar and says things like “I just wanna be left alone!” To give DT a hard time for his carefully arranged look would be no fun, as would pretending you didn’t notice. I think he wanted us, or at least me, to play along with his transformation. One time he dropped by my locker after school, even though he had graduated years before. This stands out in my high school memories as one of the finest, having been charged with real (well, fictitious) menace.

First of all, DT was obviously not a Fairview student—way too old. He came swaggering up the ramp towards the student center, this huge, creepy looking thug made even bigger by his massive overcoat, with that stubble and cigar, clearing a path of high schoolers as he went. They must’ve thought he was some kind of lunatic … they gave him plenty of space and then stood there gawking. About thirty feet from me, he called out, “Yo, DANA! Hold it!” I acted real nervous and looked around as if for an escape route, and when he reached me he said, “Tell your friend David if he calls me Mike again, he’ll wake up dead!” All the people around my locker sort of cleared out at this point, and gathered at a safe distance to see what was going on. DT looked around, and sort of put his arm around me like he was going to inflict some kind of pain if I acted up. He whispered, “Hey, Dana, what’s up? You wanna come look at that bike?” but we both knew people assumed he was saying, “It’s too late to back out now. I’ll go easy on you but you miss this next score and you’re dead meat.” I stammered out something like, “Hey, man, I don’t want any trouble.”

Then DT escorted me down the ramp towards the exit, his arm around my shoulders like we were friends but with the suggestion that this could become a headlock very suddenly. Once we were out of sight, we broke out laughing. To my delight, the next day I got some nervous questions from the guys in my honors classes, and I replied in a suitably evasive fashion. I felt like I’d made some important transition from standard nerd to somebody slightly more complicated. (Yes, it has dawned on me that my pose was about as ridiculous as DT’s, but no matter.)

So, I think I’ve known some pretty interesting people, who could be given code names and assigned roles in some totally fictitious story. Like, maybe Timofey and DT meet at a U2 concert and decide to sneak backstage or something. Except that’s dumb, they wouldn’t hit it off at all. Timofey probably wouldn’t be caught dead at U2, he’d be at a Fear concert or something, and DT would be too busy hitting on some girl in the t-shirt line to even think of sneaking backstage. And even if they did, they’d just get chucked out by security, and where’s the story in that? It’d be a really amazing memory if it actually happened to you, but stories have to be way more exciting than that, at least if they’re the type that could make me famous so I could go on “Donahue.”

So, I guess what I’m saying is, though I’d love to be a famous fiction writer, I really don’t know how, and to try to fake it makes about as much sense as changing my hair and outfit and hoping that’ll make me into an exciting, unique person. But faking it at fiction would actually be worse, because you’d read my stories and think, “This just sucks,” whereas Timofey’s hair, Masha’s tongue-in-cheek sneer, and DT’s costume were at least entertaining. So I’ll just keep reporting on that sort of thing, and hope you like it.

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Stage Play - They Haven’t Met You

Introduction

While driving down my least favorite Bay Area highway, where it always seems to be rush hour, I noticed this billboard:

The following stage play is a work of fiction and any resemblance of its characters to any actual human—living, dead, nascent, or undead—is purely coincidental. Only the billboard is real.

THEY HAVEN’T MET YOU

A Play in Two Acts

Dramatis Personae:

YOU

THEM

HIM, one of THEM

HER, one of THEM

THE HEAD GUY, one of THEM

THE OTHER GUY, one of THEM

Act One

Scene:

A cocktail party in a ranch-style house in Sunnyvale, California. The open floor plan has the kitchen bleeding into the dining room and family room, where sliding glass doors open onto a large patio next to a pool.

[Enter YOU. YOU wander over to the kitchen nook and select a bottle of beer, then drift among the guests until you fall into conversation with HIM.]

HIM: Ah, Dogfish Head. Excellent choice.

YOU: Yeah, it’s one of my favorites. Pretty cool of our hosts to style us out with it … this stuff ain’t cheap.

HIM: Well, Brad and Lisa do seem to enjoy the finer things, and I happen to know business is good at Brad’s firm … I was talking to him about it earlier.

YOU: …

[HE extends hand. YOU and HE shake.]

HIM: My name’s Nelson.

YOU: I’m Nick.

HIM: Where do you work, Nick?

YOU: San Francisco.

HIM: No, I mean, what do you do?

YOU: I’m a … vegetarian.

HIM: No, I mean, for work.

YOU: Oh, that. Well, you know … I just kind of do what I’m told and go where I’m supposed to … I’m pretty much running out the clock until retirement, to be honest.

HIM: You know, one in three people won’t retire.

YOU: I guess I’m one of the two.

HIM: Come again?

YOU: If one in three won’t retire, I’ll be one of the two who will.

HIM: How can you say that?

YOU: Well … I mean, things are going good, I’m building up some savings…

HIM: That’s crazy talk. Like I said before, one in three people won’t retire.

YOU: …

HIM: I’m not trying to be a dick or anything, but as a society we spend more time clicking “like” than planning for retirement.

YOU: I’m not really into social media, to be honest.

HIM: We spend more time looking at billboards than planning for retirement.

[YOU drain your beer and cast your gaze around the room.]

YOU: I kind of doubt that, actually.

HIM: What, you actually plan for retirement?

YOU: Well, yeah. I’m working with a financial planning outfit. They’re helping me put together a program. I’ve got a pretty healthy 401(k), and there’s my wife’s IRA, and we’re pretty well diversified. I use an online retirement calculator and I think I’m on track to retire pretty comfortably in another 10 or 15 years. It’s not exactly rocket science.

HIM: Look, I happen to know a fair bit about this, and like I said earlier, 1 in 3 people won’t retire.  So, these things you’re saying: I’m just not following you.

YOU: Oh, hey, I just spotted a friend of mine out by the pool. I’m gonna go say hi. I’ll catch you later.

Act Two

Scene:

A large conference room. THEY are gathered around a table with legal pads, laptops, and mugs of coffee.

THE HEAD GUY: Okay, next item on the agenda: Nelson, you apparently want to challenge one of the things we say? Is this for real?

HIM: Yeah, hey, it’s this retirement thing. You know how we’ve been saying that one in three people won’t retire? We’re definitely getting the word around. We’re being quoted saying this. We’re even mentioned by some billboards.

THE HEAD GUY: And your point is …?

HIM: Well, I know this sounds crazy, but I met this guy at a party, and  … I’m starting to think maybe we’re all wrong here. Maybe this thing we’re saying, about the one in three not retiring … I think we may be mistaken.

THE OTHER GUY: What, you meet some guy at a party, and now you’re second-guessing us? Like, all of us? That’s such BS, man! Nobody questions us—least of all, one of us! Who was this guy?

HIM: Well, he seemed like a pretty typical guy, middle-aged, likes good beer, wears khakis, hangs out at parties. But I got to talking to him, and apparently this guy has his retirement plan all worked out. He’s talking to some firm, has a 401(k), uses some kind of online calculator … he’s really got all his ducks in a row, which completely flies in the face of what we’ve been saying.

HER: Well, now hold on, Nelson. If we’ve been saying one in three won’t retire, that means—

HIM [cutting HER off]: That’s exactly my point! We’ve only been saying all that because we haven’t met this guy! And now I’ve met him, and he’s turned this one-in-three thing on its head! We gotta reconsider this. We gotta challenge everything we think we know.

[SHE stares at HIM for a few seconds.]

HER: As I was starting to say, Nelson: if one in three won’t retire, that means two in three will, and the statistical likelihood is pretty good that any joe we happen to encounter will be one of the two in three who will retire. So there’s really nothing remarkable at all about your friend’s having his act together.

[HE pounds fist on table.]

HIM: Damn it, Rebecca, you can blather on all you want about statistics, but that’s just because you haven’t met this guy. He’s amazing! He makes us all look like a bunch of chumps!

THE HEAD GUY: Look, here’s the thing, Nelson. Maybe you’ve met this guy, maybe you’re blown away, maybe you’re right to suddenly doubt us. But who are you? You’re not us. You’re just one of us. Nobody says, “He says…” Everyone says, “They say.” Which means us. It doesn’t mean you, and it doesn’t mean Rebecca, and it doesn’t mean me. We’re a team. And we still haven’t met this guy. So until we do, you know what we’re gonna keep saying? That’s right: “One in three people won’t retire.”

[HEAD GUY stares HIM down for a spell.]

HEAD GUY: Any questions? [Pauses.] Okay, moving right along, next agenda item: “New Things We Should Be Saying.” Ideas, anyone?

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Fiction - The Things They Carried Biking

Introduction

This post is inspired by, and is a tribute to, the short story “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien.

My intention is not to make light of the sober subject matter of that excellent story, by the way. I hasten also to point out that what follows is a work of pure fiction, and although I am the head coach of a high school mountain bike team, all of the characters in this story are utterly fictitious and any resemblance of any of them to any other human, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

The Things They Carried Biking

Head coach Eddie Cogburn carried the team roster, quasi-laminated with clear tape, in his pack. The team was small enough this season that he never had to worry about forgetting a rider’s name, and he even had the parents’ names down, but he needed the roster in case he had to make the dreaded phone call to a parent from the trail about a kid having had a serious crash. This hadn’t yet happened in his three years of coaching, but it always could. (“Inherent risk” was a term commonly used in the coach training.) Of course, he’d make this uncomfortable call only if he had cell coverage, which he had most but not all of the time. Like the other coaches, he carried a 6-ounce Motorola Talkabout walkie-talkie, with a range of theoretically 20 miles but only via line-of-sight, so it wasn’t totally reliable.

Coach Cogburn also carried a first aid kit, assembled from supplies he’d ordered online. The kit included Band-Aids, of course, and a couple dozen 4x4 gauze bandages, non-sterile, sealed up in a Ziploc. He could have bought sterile 4x4s but he didn’t kid himself you could achieve an operating room level of cleanliness out on the trail. His kit also had about ten feet of Surgilast GL-720 tubular dressing to hold 4x4s in place, and a pair of Surviveware 7.5” EMT trauma shears to cut whatever needed cutting: the Surgilast, a rider’s clothing, or strips of the brightly colored 3400CP Coflex bandages that Coach Cogburn couldn’t quite remember the purpose of. He also carried two 12-micron aluminized polyethylene mylar emergency blankets which weighed 2 ounces apiece; an 8-ounce bottle of Tecnu for poison oak exposure; Advil tablets (for coaches only); Benadryl tablets (for anyone who had a severe allergic reaction, as from a bee sting); and four pairs of disposable surgical gloves. The first aid kit, fully stocked, weighed 13 ounces and traveled in his pack which, with assorted other gear but without the bladder (which he’d ditched, preferring to drink from bottles), weighed 6 pounds 8 ounces.

The riders all carried water unless they forgot, which wasn’t entirely uncommon. Some riders carried Camelbaks which weighed 2 pounds empty and 8½ pounds with a full bladder, far more than a regular bottle which only weighed 3 ounces empty and 24 ounces full. Sophomore Jason Short swore by the Camelbak because he hated having to wipe mud off a bottle’s nipple before drinking. Junior Varsity rider Julie Mack had used a Camelbak until hers catastrophically clogged at the Conference Championships in 2016. Tucker Smith, also JV, used a Camelbak because—though he admitted this to no one—it satisfied his oral fixation. On the lonely backstretches of races he sometimes held the mouthpiece in his lips even when he wasn’t drinking.

The things they carried were determined either by necessity or by perceived necessity, though a lot of things they didn’t carry could also be considered a necessity. Sophomore rider Ryan Black didn’t carry a single thing, not even the first inkling of responsibility for his own comfort or the smooth operation of his bicycle. He didn’t have pockets to carry anything in either, favoring a loose cotton t-shirt over the standard-issue three-pocket Lycra jerseys. Jason Short carried a 27.5” inner tube (7½ ounces), a Park self-sticking patch kit, a Lezyne multi-tool (6 ounces), and even a Fox suspension shock pump (7 ounces), though the need to tune up his fork mid-ride was rare. Tucker Smith, who once famously bonked halfway through the second lap at China Camp, carried at least four Clif Shot Energy Gels at all times, which weighed about an ounce apiece. JV rider Joe Martin, who was rangy and lean and got cold easily, carried a pair of DeFeet wool arm warmers which weighed 3 ounces but came out of his pockets toward the end of virtually every ride. Varsity rider Kylie Norton, who also feared catching a chill, carried a 1-ounce polypropylene skull cap to line her helmet but she was not wearing it when she ran right over a giant, fresh, gooey cow pie while descending Conlon Trail in Wildcat Canyon Regional Park in mid-January. By necessity, all the riders carried cycling helmets—on their heads at all times or they were off the team. The helmets weighed anywhere from 9½ ounces for a Bontrager Velocis MIPS road helmet to 12 ounces for a basic Giro Fixture all-purpose hardhat.

Most of the riders carried cycling-specific sunglasses which weighed about an ounce, though many of these had lenses that were too dark for the shadier trails, especially in the early part of the season when the light was low. Kylie Norton wasn’t wearing sunglasses when she hit the cow pie and had a massive load of very fresh cow feces inexplicably thrown up right in her face, seemingly defying the laws of physics. It must not have been the direction of the tire that determined the trajectory, but the sheer impact of hitting the cow pie at high speed. When Head Coach Eddie Cogburn saw the devastating effect of the cow pie his first impulse was to grab his walkie-talkie and call in an air strike. But of course there was no enemy, no battle lines, no planes or choppers. It was just a cow pie, but what an incredibly oversized, and gooey, cow pie it was.

What they carried varied by ride and time of year. In the early winter when the rides hit right up against sunset, Team Captain Sidney Mason, a second year JV rider, carried a 2-ounce pair of North Face TKA 100 Microfleece gloves, too warm for the painful warm-up schlep up Thousand Oaks but a godsend when descending it again on the way home. Sometimes she accidentally brought her father’s almost identical but Size XL TKA 100 Microfleece gloves instead, but wore them anyway which was like having tentacles for fingers.

In addition to their water bottles, their clothing, and their tools the riders carried bike lights, front and rear, without which they weren’t allowed to ride. Coach Cogburn always carried extra lights, the cheap Malker LED blinky ones he bought in packs of four and which weighed an ounce apiece. Some rider always forgot his lights and Coach Cogburn decided it was better to let the kid do the ride than to teach him a lesson by sending him home. Cogburn also carried a spare walkie-talkie in his pack, for assistant coaches who dropped in once in a while. Cogburn’s pack was a Deuter Race EXP Air with a metal frame that kept the fabric off his back for greater ventilation and comfort. It was an excellent product but Coach Cogburn hadn’t selected it himself; he’d inherited it from his late father, and in using it he carried around a strange feeling of guilt about enjoying this surely expensive and almost brand new product that his father, being suddenly dead, had barely gotten to use.

Almost all of the riders carried smartphones. They weren’t technically allowed to use them during the rides, but what coach wouldn’t allow a kid to snap a photo of a breathtaking view? So the riders carried their phones but used them sparingly.

Several riders accumulated ride data on their phones, to post on Strava later. This data told them all kinds of useful things, but not how to ride, or why.

They carried their house keys, of course, and either padded fingerless cycling gloves, full-finger thermal gloves, or both. They carried the emotional baggage of being teenagers. They carried spare tubes, most of them, even those who wouldn’t know how to fix a flat. Freshman rider Lydia Lee carried a 6-ounce 26-inch inner tube because Coach Cogburn had given it to her, advising that she was the only rider still on 26-inch wheels, and she carried with her also the mild embarrassment of not being able to envision exactly how this weird rubber thing related to the bicycle.

Team Captain Sidney Mason carried a Lezyne Alloy Drive high volume pump, which weighed 4½ ounces with its mounting bracket and which she had never used. It was identical to the one she had lost during the CCCX Fort Ord race her sophomore year, which she and her dad went out on the course looking for, not realizing the course was already being torn down, so they got hopelessly lost in a mess of unlabeled single-track trails. By the time they got back to the pit zone (alas, without the pump), their team’s tents had been taken down, everything had been loaded in the trailer, and the rest of the team had left.

For Christmas, a few weeks before Kylie Norton rode over the cow pie, Joe Martin received a sheepskin saddle cover from his grandmother, and because he never even considered putting it on his bicycle, he carried the nagging guilt of knowing it must have cost a lot, being made of real 100% Australian Merino Sheepskin, as his grandmother proudly pointed out in her high-pitched, cracking voice.

Head Coach Cogburn carried a Light & Motion Urban 550 headlight which weighed 4 ounces and which in full power mode put out enough light to ride single-track at a moderate speed after dark, though they never did this. He carried the responsibility for his riders’ safety, and a small but nagging insecurity about whether, in this first year as head coach, he was doing a reasonable job and upholding the high standard set by those before him. He carried the vague sense that at least some riders saw him as merely a chaperone, unaware of his past success as a bike racer and coach. This apprehension on Coach Cogburn’s part wasn’t totally unfounded, as JV rider Morgan Gleeson carried with her a pronounced skepticism about Cogburn’s expertise, since he wasn’t on Strava and never used the term “efforts” (he’d surely said “effort” at some point, but never in the plural form that indicated training savvy). Earlier in the day on which Kylie Norton hit the fresh cow pie at high speed, Morgan Gleeson had also been burdened with the pressing fear that, on the steep section of Meadows just before the turnoff to Inspiration Point, she might actually hurl due to the entire chorizo pizza she’d unwisely eaten at lunch.

The riders carried food, when they remembered. Usually this was Clif bars or gels or Shot Blox, but Joe Martin carried chocolate Pop-Tarts toaster pastries which weighed 2 ounces apiece and came in a two pack, and were, he claimed, nutritionally similar to an energy bar. Tucker Smith favored Corn Nuts in 1½-ounce packages even though they weren’t particularly high-carb. For the most part the riders carried themselves with responsibility, with the restraint and adherence to trail etiquette that had been drilled into them a hundred times. But sometimes they got a little out of hand, let the adrenaline get the better of them, and failed to slow down enough for this or that hiker. Sometimes they slowed down plenty but nothing was good enough for the hiker. When this happened it was usually with old folks who sometimes yelled out angrily even if the riders slowed to less than a jogging pace and politely announced their presence. Sometimes the mere fact of their being on a bike, or their being young and healthy, seemed to incite a hiker. Most of the riders carried the inescapable knowledge that there are unhappy people in this world and being out in nature isn’t always enough to pacify them.

Team Captain Sidney Mason carried her keychain-sized YMCA membership card, even though she would never ride her $5,000 mountain bike to the Y or anywhere else where it could be stolen. She carried her Kryptonite key on the same keychain, which was similarly pointless. She carried also the weight of her outstanding college applications and the constant dread that she wouldn’t get in anywhere good and she’d end up at one of her safety schools. This was similar, though not identical, to the fear that her teammate Buck Hill carried, that—now that he’d made Varsity—he might never get to mount the podium again. This wasn’t terribly different, in terms of burden, to the burning crush that Joe Martin had on Kylie Norton but kept utterly secret from all his teammates, particularly Kylie, and which more than anything fed his seemingly hopeless desire to distinguish himself on the bike.

Assistant Coach Tim Roberts carried the usual spare tube, patch kit, and multi-tool, along with a first aid kit that Head Coach Eddie Cogburn had pressed on him and which he didn’t feel he could reasonably decline. He also carried a shock pump, because he’d paid for it, and he carried the nagging feeling that so much of this gear was pointless for him to be schlepping, with three other coaches on every ride. Moreover, he bristled under the burden of knowing his loaded pack was just slowing him down, all so these spry, sprightly, seemingly unbreakable kids could, if they so chose, ask to have their suspension forks dialed in mid-ride, while Tim was gasping for breath on every climb with nobody jumping to his aid.

Head Coach Eddie Cogburn always carried two extra-large water bottles, which weighed 28 ounces each when full. When Kylie Norton hit the cow pie, brought her bike to a shuddering stop, and stood there straddling it shrieking almost hysterically for several minutes as her teammates surrounded her, Coach Cogburn couldn’t decide right away if the unpleasant cold of her getting sprayed full in the face with his water bottle outweighed the disgust and disgrace of the poor girl having oozing, seemingly molten cow feces all over her face. Finally he decided to risk the cold and hosed off Kylie’s face while she clawed at it with her gloved hands, almost starting to gag. Ryan Black shook his head and said, over and over again, “I think this is a bad omen.” Joe Martin, who carried his secret crush on Kylie like a closely guarded treasure, said, “What are you talking about, omen?” and Ryan Black said, “You know, an omen, like a bad portent.” John Martin said that was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard and inwardly vowed to crush Ryan Black utterly, no matter what it took, next time they climbed Seaview.

Coach Cogburn carried a variety of odds and ends. He had a couple of “boots,” sections cut from the sidewalls of old tires, to place between the inner tube and a large gash in a tire. He carried a valve core wrench, which had come in handy three times during the previous season alone. He carried quick-links for 10- and 11-speed chains. These items weighed essentially nothing. Coach Cogburn also carried a size large wind jacket at all times which weighed 7ounces, and a 4-ounce size medium wind vest that he could squeeze into but which would also fit any of the riders in a pinch because they tended to under-dress and forgot to carry extra clothing.

The riders carried on a constant repartee designed to pass the time and to seem like they weren’t actually suffering from the pace. They even joked about what had happened to Kylie. They didn’t really think this was funny but it was part of the bluster they needed to show, to hide their lump-in-throat fear, their cold knowledge that that could have been me. “Nothing like a good, fresh cow pie,” Buck Hill said. “You know, the crispy, crusty outer shell around the gooey liquid center.” Coach Roberts could have added, “Yeah, like Freshen-up gum,” but he didn’t want to join in coarsely joking about the tragedy, and besides, he know none of these kids had ever heard of Freshen-up and they’d just look at him with that classic nonplussed expression Roberts’ kids were always wearing.

Head Coach Eddie Cogburn carried with him the burden of knowing he could have prevented Kylie Norton’s calamity had he pointed out the cow pie. He’d been leading the descent, with Kylie (a crackerjack bike handler) not far behind. He couldn’t believe the size of the cow pie and though he saw it just in time, he only barely missed it and didn’t have a chance to drop a hand and wave it back and forth in the universal signal for “Look out, obstacle.” He’d been distracted, as it happened, by thoughts of his first aid kit. There he was, leading the whole group down the steep descent of Conlon, a time when he should have had his full attention focused on the trail ahead, but was puzzling over the purpose of the spool of Coflex bandage he was carrying. Why did it come in different colors? Was this just decorative, or did the color indicate functional differences, one spool to the next? And what was the Coflex for, anyway? The Surgilast stretch sock was used to hold the 4x4s in place, that was clear enough; but what was this stretchy Coflex supposed to do? Is it like an Ace bandage? Is to stabilize a splint—the 36” SAM splint that Coach Cogburn hadn’t yet procured? It was at the moment he contemplated this oversight that he heard Kylie Norton scream, and as he slammed on the brakes and pulled over to a stop he was surprised not to hear the telltale static-like sound of a rider hitting the dirt. It was just a scream that turned into a series of shrieks, then the yelling of other riders as they gathered around her.

From here on out, Coach Cogburn decided, he was going to keep his head in the game, concentrate on what was required of him in the moment, and stop worrying about what was or wasn’t in his pack; where his pack came from; whether he deserved to be using it; whether his riders respected him; and whether he was up to snuff as a coach. He’d be methodical and unemotional from now on. He’d buy that SAM splint, read up on Coflex, maybe email the Wilderness First Aid instructor about it , even watch a few instructional YouTube videos, and then he’d move on. He’d stop carrying on an internal dialogue during these rides. He’d keep his eyes far ahead on the trail and next time he came upon a grotesquely oversized, fresh and glistening cow pie, he’d bloody well point it out.

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My Humiliating Senior Prom!

NOTE: This post is rated PG-13 for mild strong language and alcohol references.

Introduction

The official story I tell my kids is that I never went to the senior prom. Allegedly I couldn’t, because I had either the ACT exam the next day, or the State Road Championships. (My story varies.) “I knew I had a better shot at the [exam] [race] than the prom,” I explain dryly.

This year, on a lark, I decided to share the real story with my older daughter, shortly before her first prom. In doing so I realized it’s not a bad tale, so I’ll share it with you too, recreated from memory with maximum verisimilitude.

My senior prom – spring 1987

To start off, I hadn’t planned on attending at all. The whole idea seemed completely outlandish to me. My high school was an “open campus,” meaning I was almost never there and barely knew anybody. Meanwhile, I was not exactly a ladies’ man. I wasn’t good looking or confident. I wasn’t up on popular music or sports. I had no concept of fashion except Levi’s 501s and bike race t-shirts. I was only slightly less socially retarded than my brothers, who were so shy they were actually mistaken for foreign exchange students.

There was one girl, Michelle, whom I could have asked to prom, but the problem was, I kind of liked her so it wasn’t worth the risk of rejection. But there was this other girl, in my French class, whom I didn’t like at all. Actually, to be clear, I liked her as a pal, but didn’t want to go out with her whatsoever. The sad truth is, she was as homely as I was, or as I felt, anyway (which was either more or less homely than I actually was, because what teenager ever had an accurate self-image?). This girl was fun to talk to, particularly in class, but that was about it. If you’re wondering whether or not I’m going to tell you her name, I’m not—for the simple reason that I cannot remember it. This just shows you how small I am, or at least how small I was. If she had been pretty, of course I’d remember her name.

I can’t remember exactly why I asked this girl to prom. It was for one of two reasons, maybe both. One, she was really bummed out because her horse had died. Yes, you read that right: in Colorado it was actually possible to own a horse. Hers had been killed in a highway accident (trailer rollover). I never knew if the horse died instantly or had to be put down (I wasn’t about to ask). So I may have actually invited her out of pity. The other possible reason is that I happened to know the obscure fact that “prom” is short for “promenade dance,” and I really wanted to showcase this knowledge by asking, “Would you care to accompany me to the promenade dance?” This is exactly how I asked, and the girl immediately said yes, with a big smile. Inwardly, this shocked and dismayed me, which made me feel like the complete dick that I knew I was.

Well, for the next week she chattered all through French class about her quest for the perfect prom dress. This made me feel worse than ever. It was obviously far too late to cancel the whole thing—every moment she spent savoring her anticipation dug us both in deeper. I knew I should try to match her enthusiasm but I just couldn’t. For one thing, I couldn’t dance—I was far too inhibited. Second, I didn’t own a suit and wasn’t about to throw good money after a bad idea by renting a tux. Finally, I had no car and didn’t want to ask my parents to borrow theirs, because that would mean admitting I was going to prom, which for some reason I was just not prepared to do. I feared—or perhaps hoped—this lack of wheels would be a show-stopper.

When I came clean about the car, my date (gasp!) didn’t even care. She’d just gotten her first car, and was a modern girl. This was gonna be great, etc. Daaaaamn! This obstacle having vanished, I decided I better bite the bullet and rent a tux. I went down to the strip mall with my friend John. He was attending the prom non-ironically and wanted to look sharp. I wish I remembered the name of that cheesy tux place. Their entire clientele seemed to be high school kids. It was obvious that these tuxes were pure shit—and yet, every dude who put one on managed to look really good. I couldn’t understand it. (I do now … it’s called youth.)

Well, there was actually one kid who didn’t look good in the rental tux: me. Part of it was my fault; I was about six-foot-one, 140 pounds. Great physique for bike racing, in the purely utilitarian way that webbed fingers and toes would be good for competitive swimming. The other problem was that I was a cheap bastard and was looking for that one-in-a-thousand suit that fit me right off the rack and wouldn’t require alterations, which were $10 extra. I found that one suit, but it was—I kid you not—pink. Not some marginally acceptable salmon or coral (which might have gone over okay, this being the era of “Miami Vice.”) It was pure, awful pink. Pepto-Bismol pink. Crayola carnation pink.

Because of its color, this tux was actually a cheaper rental than the black ones. Admitting I was a nerd to begin with, and vainly attempting the apotheosis from nerd to smartass, I decided to do it. For my boutonniere I chose, of course, a pink carnation. I thought it very clever to point out that, against my tux, it was “boutonniere camo,” and I tried this line on pretty much everybody I encountered the entire night, without eliciting so much as a smirk. But I see I’m getting ahead of myself.

Before the promenade dance proper, of course, there was the requisite fancy dinner. I agonized over where to eat, which might suggest that I was developing some kind of gusto for the whole affair, but the dinner was merely the only aspect of prom I could manage to develop an opinion about. Among prospective restaurants the front-runner was JJ McCabe’s, which was known for being lax about liquor laws. (This was valuable only in that it leant a mystique; I was too risk-averse, and too cheap, to actually contemplate buying booze.) But I’d eaten at JJ McCabe’s once with my parents, and the service was unbelievably slow … we sat for almost an hour waiting for our food. My dad surmised that every member of the staff was drunk off his loins. I couldn’t take that risk on prom night.

Pelican Pete’s was also kind of flashy, because seafood was still a rare thing in Boulder in 1987. But their food kind of sucked. Tico’s had great food and unlimited chips, but I didn’t want to actually insult my date. The Good Earth was trendy but a little too granola for me. So I finally settled on Sebastians, which had a salad bar that was so fancy you could get caviar. Not that I liked caviar—it was like eating salted ball bearings—but it just screamed “deluxe.” On top of that, the salad bar format was perfect from the budgeting standpoint. After all, nobody orders an appetizer before a salad bar, and nobody gets dessert afterward. I could confidently bring exactly the right amount of money. Sebastians was a no-brainer.

The night started off badly, and not because of my pink suit as you might have speculated. In fact, my date was wearing an orange dress. Not a subtle, marginally acceptable peach or pumpkin color, but a purely awful tint of orange, the color of a Creamsicle.  I’m tempted to say it was even worse than my pink tux, since she’d actually selected it in pursuit of aesthetic élan rather than in defiance of it, but then nothing could have looked worse than that pink tux. Anyway, it wasn’t like she forgave my suit because her dress was awful; she forgave my suit because she was a totally laid-back, cool chick—at least, when it came to me.

With herself, she was much less forgiving (which I suppose isn’t rare). She was upset because, when doing a last-minute check of her beloved new (to her) Toyota Corolla, making sure it was still lookin’ real good, she discovered that the kickass narrow-stripe whitewall tires on the driver’s side were not matched by kickass narrow-stripe whitewall tires on the passenger side. The starboard tires were simply black. Her sweet ride was asymmetrical!

Poor thing. She hadn’t looked this miserable since her horse died. The only sympathetic sentiment I could come up with was “Honestly, your car looks terrible regardless,” but of course I couldn’t say that. She was so agitated and stressed out she was sweating profusely. Actually, the sweating probably had something to do with the fur coat she was wearing, which she’d borrowed from her aunt. May was a bit late in the season for a fur, and it was an unseasonably warm evening.

At Sebastians, things continued going downhill. Turns out the legendary salad bar wasn’t every night. Maybe it wasn’t on weekends, or maybe they decided to screw the prom crowd. Ordering off the menu meant I wouldn’t have enough money. At least, not for two. So I lied and told my date I’d already eaten. For the first time that evening, she seemed miffed. But the waiter was solicitous and the place was swanky, and her spirits improved. As we waited for our—well, her—food to come out, she said, in a conspiratorial whisper, “Look: I come prepared. I’ve been to the Liquor Mart.” She held out her purse. It was stocked with airline-sized bottles of Goldschlager cinnamon schnapps. I raised an eyebrow. “I’ll drink one if I wanna have fun,” she said, “a second if I wanna get crazy, and a third if things get good.”

I was shocked. This girl was cool, I realized. Far, far too cool for me. I was in way over my head. I didn’t have the nerve to drink alcohol. I was just a stupid, ignorant, shy, untutored nerd, and here I was, out with a girl who possessed shades of Woman. That she assumed I was game was both flattering and terrifying. I tried to shrug, to show how cool and unflustered I was, but it came out more like a muscle spasm.

She excused herself to freshen up, and I sat at the table feeling utterly unmoored. What if this girl knew how to dance, too? What if her sang-froid made her popular at the prom? What if she were actually far less of a pariah at the high school than I was? What would I do, in this terrible pink suit? Fortunately, not long after she returned the bread arrived, so I had something to do with my hands. And my mouth. I stuffed my face nervously, and actually my dark mood lifted a bit via the thrill of eating real butter, almost for the first time in my life.

Halfway through my date’s entrée, things were looking up. She kind of chewed with her mouth open, which helped put me at ease. I made a lot of wisecracks about the people around us (mostly old grey-hairs, I realized with a pang), and she giggled a lot. However sophisticated and daring she might be, I reflected, she did seem to dig me. So I’d almost recovered my composure when, casting about for another old person to bag on, I spied my own father dining across the restaurant from us, seated with a woman who was obviously not my mom.

I say “obviously” because my parents had been divorced for almost three years. I still wasn’t used to the idea, and it stung to see my dad out with another woman. He’d never taken my mom out on a date, not during my lifetime. Her birthday, Mother’s Day, their anniversary … nothing would justify, for him, a splurge like this. The other problem was that the woman he was dining with was Horseface, whom I couldn’t stand.

I should probably explain here that this really wasn’t Horseface’s fault. She wasn’t a mean person or anything. In fact, she wasn’t even ugly. Her face wasn’t so much horsey as, well, equine. Yes, kind of a long face, but not painful to look at or anything. The real reason for the nickname is that my dad was dating, concurrently, another woman with the same name and we had to keep them straight. My dad seemed to be dating half the women in Boulder. (The less attractive half, it must be said.) My dislike for Horseface was grounded plainly in the fact of her—in the fact of my dad dating.

So yeah, I was a bit pissed off. Perhaps the whole heady atmosphere of the evening was affecting me, because I brashly strode over to my dad’s table. I didn’t have a plan or anything; I just wanted to make him uncomfortable.

This failed utterly, which I should have seen coming. For me to also be dining at this posh restaurant only helped my dad show off—like, look at my son, he’s only 17 but he’s  already living the good life! My dad beamed and said, “Hello Dana.” I greeted Horseface politely, and she beamed too, like we were all just great friends. I suddenly felt like I might be sick to my stomach. It dawned on me that my blood sugar was low, and I noticed that my dad not only had some giant entrée, but a side of fettuccine Alfredo. I was overcome with bitterness.

Whenever we went out to eat—which was mighty rare, by the way—my dad would say at the beginning, “Boys, you may have anything on the menu under $3.50.” This usually limited our choices to the cheapest and second-cheapest items. And here he was living large with a side of pasta! Impulsively, perhaps thinking that this might somehow impress my date, I said casually, “I’ll be taking this,” and with a nod to Horseface, I walked off, bringing the plate of pasta with me to my table.

My date looked shocked. Two things dawned on me. For one, since I’d rudely neglected to introduce her to my dad and his date, she had no idea who these people were. Second, after bizarrely not ordering any food, I’d now stolen some. Suddenly this pasta was even more embarrassing than wearing  a pink suit. My response to this horrifying epiphany was to start eating the pasta as fast as possible, just to make it go away. I doubled down on this activity when I saw my dad, a terrifying tall man with hawk-like features and a big red beard, storming over to our table. He didn’t even ask who my date was (which was actually a relief) and tried to take his pasta back. We got in a little tug-of-war over it while I hissed at him about putting on the dog with this other woman when he’d never given his own family a nice night on the town, etc.

Amazingly, things proceeded to get even worse. My dad’s date strutted her shameless way over to us and cried out, “What on Earth!?” I glared at her and said, “You stay out of this, Horseface!” Only after her moniker slipped past my lips did I realize what I’d just said. Of course she was unaware of this unfortunate nickname, or had been until now. She gasped, started to cry, and stormed off. I felt terrible. So, evidently, did my date, who abruptly snatched up her purse and stood. My dad took off after Horseface—on a trajectory that, alas, matched my date’s sudden restroom-bound vector. The two collided, and whether it was the impact or just coincidence, my date erupted in a big, throaty, cinnamon-schnapps-scented belch. The dinner was officially a total disaster.

The waiter, professional to the core, discreetly flitted by to deposit our check, which I paid in cash, rounding up so we could bail immediately. We got out to the parking lot where my date, fuming, fumbled endlessly with her car keys. Remembering what I’d had rammed down my throat repeatedly in Health class, I asked, “Um … how much have you had to drink?” She held up three fingers, took the hint, and tossed me her car keys. As I fetched them from the asphalt she made her way around to the non-whitewall-tired side of her car.

Now, you’ll think me terribly petty for saying so, but here was an unexpected silver lining: I got to drive! It’s not just that my masculine dignity was assuaged (though that was, I’ll admit, part of it). The thing was, I loved to drive and almost never got to. I started up the Corolla and looked over at my date. “Just take me home,” she said. She was on the verge of tears. “Right,” I replied.

I drove, she directed, and as we neared her house she said, “Wait. Just stop the car for a minute. I have to think.” A probable truth dawned on me: she was embarrassed to get home early and have to tell her parents that her big night had crashed and burned. “We could just drive around,” I offered. To my surprise, she agreed. As we drove, I attempted some damage control.

“Look,” I said, “in case you’re feeling bad about burping in my dad’s face, don’t. Your burp … it was just awesome. The best. I’ve been practicing my belching skills for years and I’ve never managed anything that rich and full. Your belch had authority. You clearly don’t fuck around when it comes to oral eructation. And another thing: my dad totally had that coming. In fact that was long overdue. I only regret that I didn’t get to do it myself.”

My date was laughing now. She seemed relieved by my utter lack of reproach, and clearly appreciated the levity. It certainly didn’t hurt that she was drunk. Emboldened by how my opening salvo went over, and by the simple act of driving a car, I talked some more, describing my parents’ divorce, trying to hit the right balance of humility, swagger, flippancy, and vulnerability. Eventually—boosted by perhaps her fourth fun-sized schnapps of the evening—my date agreed to return to plan, and we headed to the prom.

The prom was at a hotel we always thought was pretty swank; only now do I realize its cheesiness. But even then I thought the decorations were pretty twee. The planning committee had somehow settled on a barn-raising, pioneer-spirit, good-old-fashioned hoe-down theme, totally at odds with the music (Madonna, the Fixx, the Bangles, U2, Berlin, Cindi Lauper, Van Halen, etc.). As soon as we got there, my date hit the dance floor hard, trying to drag me along. Terrified, feeling like a mouse who finds himself in the middle of the floor, I bobbed up and down, trying to move my chin with the music. My date, lost in the music, seemed to forget about me, so I gradually made my way to the edge of the room.

Encountering various classmates who looked vaguely familiar, I tried my line about the camo boutonniere a number of times and got nowhere. Eventually I found my friend Sean, with whom I engaged in bagging on lame people. I didn’t really know Sean very well—just from a few classes—but he seemed oddly non-nerdy for a guy willing to hang out with me. I pondered, not for the first time, that this might be exactly how he felt about me.

The yearbook staffers were relentless, so my date and I caved and headed to the photo station where we were supposed to pose on a couple of hay bales. My date, off-balance and staggering, leaned on me for support. My rented tux shoes—made entirely of smooth plastic, it seemed, even the soles—slipped, and I leaned back on her, and her feet—shod in ridiculous high heels—slid right out from under her and I ended up sitting on her lap. The yearbook photo captured us in this ridiculous configuration, and to make matters worse I appear, in the photo, to be looking down the front of her dress. Actually, I totally was. I couldn’t help it. The dress gaped open and it was just a reflex. Fortunately, in those days you didn’t see the photo right away, so my date wasn’t (yet) livid. In fact, she asked me to slow-dance.

The slow-dance was very easy. Nobody was really paying attention to anybody but their date. They just shuffled around, leaning on each other, probably most of the girls preoccupied with worry that their date would do something untoward, and certainly most of the boys hoping to cop a feel (or “grab handfuls of ass,” in the parlance of that time). I behaved myself. In fact, it was all I could do to keep my date on her feet. I tried to recall how many airline bottles of schnapps had been in that purse … surely she’d drunk all of them. She reeked of cinnamon—it must have been coming out her pores. Still, when she relaxed and leaned her head on my shoulder, that was kind of nice. At least, it was nice for a while, until suddenly—“Oh, shit!” my date cried. She recoiled from me as if from an electric shock. What had I done?

Turns out it wasn’t what I’d done … it was what she’d done, which was to have a nosebleed all over my tux. “I am so sorry!” she said over and over, lugubriously. I didn’t know what to say. Of course I was livid about the tux—imagine forking over good money to replace a pink tux!—but she looked so miserable I couldn’t worry too much about myself. The poor girl. First her horse dies, then her car has only two narrow-stripe whitewall tires, then her date is a cad in a pink suit, which she bleeds on. She just can’t get a break! I decided to act like a good guy. “Are you okay?” I asked. “Do you need help? Has this happened before?” She flapped her hands around. “It’s just when I’m stressed out,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

My mind raced. “No need to apologize,” I said. “I’m just glad it’s nothing serious. I saw this movie where a guy gets nosebleeds and it’s from a brain aneurysm!” Now she looked a bit freaked out. “It’s okay, I’m sure you’re not having an aneurysm,” I said, realizing how absurd it was to say such a thing, and yet how unconvincing I sounded. “I’ll get you a damp towel,” I continued.

I set off toward the restroom like a man on a mission. Unfortunately, the shortest route was straight across the dance floor, which—by this point—was back to normal (non-slow) dancing. I weaved and bobbed and suddenly my sunglasses flew off. (Yes, it’s stupid to wear shades indoors, especially at a dance, but I was desperately trying to look cool.) They were stupid sunglasses, fake Ray-Ban Wayfarers that were way too dark, but still I was hell-bent on finding them. Pacing around bent over, I got kneed in the face (either accidently or on purpose, I never learned) and now, unbelievably, I too had a nosebleed.

I got to the restroom where a formally attired valet was handing out warm cotton towels. No, of course that’s not true—I grabbed a couple fistfuls of paper towels, wetted them at the sink, and made my way back to my date (the long way around, this time, trying to disappear). I held the towels to the back of my neck in accordance with the old wives’ tale that it would stop the nosebleed, which it didn’t. The towels began to shred and form little pills, like toe-jam footballs, on the collar of my tux. My date was not impressed. What’s more, everybody began loudly mocking us. “Look, it’s the nosebleed twins!” someone taunted. We beat it out of there, dripping blood as we went.

“Oh my god, drive slower,” my date pleaded. “Everything is spinning. Oh god oh god oh god.” Halfway to her house, she puked all over her aunt’s fur and the upholstery of her car. The stench was a horrible congress of bile and cinnamon. I cranked my window down and hung my head out, like a dog. When we got to her house and I swung the car into the driveway, I didn’t see the empty garbage can there—an old-school steel one—and rammed it, causing a massive racket. My date’s dad burst out of the house, taking the porch steps two at a time. He was already furious, as though he’d just known the night would be a disaster. “What in the hell?!” he fumed. I handed my date her keys, spun on my heel, and without a word strode off, beginning the long journey home on foot. The night had been an unmitigated disaster. I didn’t even find my sunglasses.

In French class the next week, my (ex-)date and I didn’t say a word to each other. Fortunately, the end of the school year was not far off. We managed to literally never speak again, and then we graduated, moved off to college, and were thus spared any future awkwardness. And did I learn my lesson? Definitely. I never attended another school dance.

Epilogue

What you have just read is a work of pure fiction. The official story—that I never went to prom—is the true one. When I wrote that I decided “to share the real story” with my daughter, I was equivocating: it’s a real story in the sense that it’s really a story—i.e., really a work of fiction. When I promised maximum verisimilitude, I meant to the story I’d told my daughter … not to any real events. And although I can’t claim that none of the characters bear any resemblance to any actual human, living or dead, I assure you the self-portrait is a caricature.

This tale was born on the night of my daughter’s prom, when my wife and I were chatting. “No, you did go to prom,” my wife said. “How could you forget? You rented that awful pink tux!” Thus began a dialogue of improv. “Oh, yeah!” I replied. “And my date’s dress was orange!” Etc.

The version of this story I told my daughter ended with a character inexplicably grabbing my leg and pulling on it—“just the way, in fact, that I’m pulling on yours,” I quipped. My daughter, crestfallen, said, “Oh, Dad, I so wanted that all to be true!”

My younger daughter overheard me reading this to my wife, and though she ran from the room, and called out to me to speak more quietly because she couldn’t handle hearing it, she ended up listening to the whole thing. She was hugely relieved to discover it was fiction. Are you?

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From the Archives - Fiction - Roommate

Introduction

It being a slow news day, here’s a bit of short fiction from my archives. Enjoy please enjoy.

Roommate – June 1, 1989

It was an art, really. Nobody cooked ramen‑spaghetti like Nick did (albeit because nobody cooked it at all). The process gave him solace. No matter what was going wrong with his day, he could always count on his keenly precise cooking techniques to assure him that all was not lost. He would think, “Well, the ramen’s perfect anyway. At least there’s one thing in my life I haven’t screwed up yet.”

But today, Nick knew something was wrong as soon as he stepped into the kitchen. His demon roommate had stunk the place up. Scott, whose entire diet consisted of beans and brown rice, was sick again and thought he could cure himself by drinking gallons of tea infused with garlic. Scott wasn’t the first one to try this delusional home remedy. Nick’s own brother had tried it, too … when he was eight.

The smell itself wasn’t the only problem. Beyond this, Scott had used Nick’s pot. Nick was used to his roommates using his kitchenware, but not this pot. It was a gift, like almost everything else, from a friend who had used it all through college. “If you can handle not having a handle, it’s a great pot,” she had said. She was referring to the steel stub that had once supported a wooden handle. The stub never heated up too much, since almost all Nick cooked in the pot was ramen. And it was the perfect ramen pot, being the perfect size for two packages.

Nick’s routine was like clockwork. While the water heated up, he would pour spaghetti sauce into his special bowl. He used to have an even better bowl, with a fill line for the sauce, but Scott had broken it. Sure, Nick couldn’t prove that Scott broke it; somebody started a crack and one day the bowl finally split in half. But Scott was his scapegoat. Every household needs one, he mused, and this demon roommate had earned the title. The bowl Nick used now was less handy, but cool anyway: a white china bowl with a blue Japanese‑looking fish on the bottom. One of Scott’s former roommates had left it behind when he abruptly dropped out of college, having gone crazy. As in, he was literally in a mental hospital.

Nick would put the bowl of spaghetti sauce in the microwave, but he wouldn’t start it right away. Once the water was boiling and the noodles were all separated, he would reduce the heat and then start the microwave. The sauce didn’t need to be very hot; cooking it served as a timer more than anything. On half power, the microwave would warm the sauce just enough. When the microwave timer showed one minute, he would turn the stove off completely. With the lid on, it would keep cooking. He doubted—no, he knew—that Scott never took this energy-saving step; Scott looked at conservation only from a financial standpoint, and therefore acquainted it with being cheap. As if he wasn’t a low-class, low-rent, low-tier guy to begin with. He might as well admit it.

As soon as the timer rang, Nick would test one noodle. If it was done, he would pour the noodles in the waiting colander, then slide them into the bowl atop the sauce. The warm sauce cooled the noodles just enough to eat immediately once stirred, with a good shake of powdered parmesan from the green cardboard shaker.

But today his pot was dirty. Scott had used it to boil his smelly tea. Scott stubbornly insisted on brewing the tea several times a day. He couldn’t make a whole pot in advance and reheat mugs of it throughout the day, because he couldn’t figure out the microwave oven. It was an old-dog-new-tricks situation (Scott was thirty-fricking-three). Nick tried to show him how the microwave worked, but Scott just refused to learn. All manner of electronics mystified him, which was ironic since he was getting his Master’s in computer science.

Scott never figured out how to use his digital watch, either. When Nick realized this, he played a trick: he set alarm to go off at 2:00 am every night, just to see if the demon roommate would finally sit down and figure out how to disable it. Amazingly, not only did Scott fail to learn this, but couldn’t even figure out how to silence the alarm mid-ring. It was as though he was afraid to push a single button on the watch. Instead he made a habit of putting the watch in his sock drawer every night so it wouldn’t wake him up.

How would this guy, upon finishing grad school, find a job in the computer industry? Rely on his good looks? Hardly. Okay, he wasn’t a bad-looking guy, but also wasn’t nearly as handsome as he himself believed. He was so damn proud of his highway‑patrolman mustache, he would just sit in front of the mirror admiring it, like Narcissus. Nick, laboring to suppress a sneer nearby, would eventually give himself away. Then Scott would say, “Yeah, you could never grow one of these, could you? That’s a shame. Man, I used to have a full beard. Looked damn good too. Did I ever show you the picture of that?” Nick would roll his eyes. Only about a thousand times. Scott would reiterate, “You never could grow one of these. It’s not in your genes. Guess you’re outta luck.” Nothing Nick could say would deter him. Scott would continue admiring his reflection, and Nick would just stand there wishing he had a gun.

Normally Nick didn’t have to worry about Scott using his special ramen‑pot, because it was steel. Scott, like a lot of paranoid people, equated aluminum pots with Alzheimer’s disease. But he took it a step further, avoiding steel as well. He had one stovetop-safe glass pot, but today it was covered in burnt rice, and the dirtbag had resorted to borrowing the ramen pot.

This was a guy who took liberties. He left messes, he borrowed your stuff, you might even find him in your own bedroom sitting in your chair listening to your stereo. He had an entitled air about him, like Goldilocks. He had even discarded his given name and rechristened himself Scott. He probably chose this just so he could nickname himself “the Scotsman,” despite being the farthest thing from Scottish. He loved to refer to himself in the third person. As in, “I met a young woman at the gym today and got her number. Looks like the Scotsman’s gonna get laid!”

Now Nick was in a rush—to zip home between classes and have a ramen spaghetti meal before rushing back for his next class required clockwork precision. Now his whole system was thrown off. When the microwave beeped he hastily pulled one long noodle from the pot, let it cool for a few seconds, and tested it. It was perfect—the gears in his machine seemed to be meshing again. He signed contentedly—and poured the noodles down the garbage disposal. The colander! He had completely forgotten it! And it was all because of the Scotsman throwing him off his game!

He was furious. His lunch—gone. No time to start over—he’d have to go hungry. Nick’s mind raced. Scott and that damn tea, he thought. I’ll get him for this. I’ll kill him! But how? Suddenly, he remembered the Winchester 30.06. He knew just how to get it, too. It was in his neighbor’s glass display case, and the neighbor’s eight-year-old kid had the key on a string around his neck. But that was the neighbor in his hometown, more than a thousand miles away, and that little eight‑year‑old was probably in high school by now. What could Nick do? There was always the chef’s knife . . . but he probably didn’t have the nerve. He didn’t doubt that he could overpower his roommate—he could envision the old dude’s brittle bones snapping like twigs. But there couldn’t be blood—then he would lose the damage deposit on the apartment. No, it would have to be clean—the perfect crime.

He didn’t have much time to hatch a revenge plot—Scott would be home by about five. He checked his watch, and was suddenly overcome with inspiration. Of course! The watch! As Nick watched the liquid crystal digits rolling over precisely, the seconds changing like magic, a plan unfolded before his eyes. The Scotsman had been talking nonstop about a meeting he was to have with the one professor on campus who still respected him. Scott freely—almost proudly—admitted that his flamboyant personality had irritated all the other professors to the point of complete alienation. And Nick knew a bit more than Scott had let on, since he had friends in the Computer Science department. Many people knew that Scott had virtually no hands‑on computer experience. Sure, he could write decent programs on paper, but that wouldn’t make him a real programmer. The ones who spent their entire lives in front of the computer—they would be competing for the jobs. For them, school was just a side‑show; they had been dominating the keyboards since they were teenagers. Scott, meanwhile, had spent ten years working at a factory after washing out in the white-collar world. Grad school was his second chance, but he needed to find a thesis advisor before he could finish his Master’s—and he had only one prospect left. Whether or not he could make a good impression at Friday’s meeting was up to him—until he decided not to wash that pot. Now, his fate was in Nick’s hands.

It was almost too simple. Nick would swipe Scott’s watch that night and change the alarm. The meeting was at 2:00 p.m.—he would set the alarm for 2:15. He envisioned the result: as the ignorant fool chatted with the professor, desperate to make a good impression, the watch would suddenly start beeping. The Scotsman, as shocked as the professor, would be powerless to stop the shrill “BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP! BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP!” For maybe five seconds, he would just listen to it, his face turning red, the professor becoming increasingly irritated by the unpleasant noise. Then, Scott would try in vain to muffle it with his hand. After about ten seconds, the professor would stare in disbelief as the computer science major clumsily fumbled with the band, finally stripping the delinquent watch from his wrist and shoving it in his pocket. The professor would realize the irony of the situation and burst out laughing. The damage already done, Scott could theoretically laugh with him, or make a futile excuse. But that wasn’t his nature. No, his explosive temper would take over, and he would blurt out something offensive and storm out of the room. He might reach the end of the hall before realizing that he had just ruined his last chance at getting a thesis advisor—and hence at getting his master’s degree in computer science. Once the word got out about his folly with the digital watch, and the ensuing loss of temper, he would be the laughingstock of the entire department.

Would the Scotsman then transfer to another school, to finally complete his degree? No chance. He was a quitter—always had been. A decade earlier, he’d received his first rejection slip from a magazine editor and immediately gave up all hope of becoming a writer, despite having a journalism degree. In like fashion, he would leave the university, unable to complete his goal, and return to the factory, a broken man. Nick’s revenge would be complete. And he couldn’t be punished! Even if he were convicted of tampering with Scott’s watch, was that a crime? In itself, no . . . Nick sat back, chuckling. It would indeed be the perfect crime.

Right around five, Scott arrived at the apartment, and between snorting, wheezing, and hacking up snot in the sink, he told Nick about this certain girl, who was so good looking, and not bitchy at all, but actually really sweet, and how he could tell she liked him, and how he wanted to “treat her to an active sex life.” Scott brushed his teeth, admired his reflection for a while, then continued his bedtime ritual by stashing his watch in the sock drawer. He was asleep within the hour, whereupon Nick retrieved the watch, put it in alarm set mode, expertly marched the digits across the screen until the alarm was set for 2:15 p.m., and returned the watch to its drawer. He had launched his magnificent plan and Scott would handle the rest, the mechanism of his own humiliation and rage set into motion like clockwork.

At precisely 2:28 the next afternoon, Nick looked up from his ramen to see the Scotsman crash through the front door in a blind rage. He crossed the room and began smashing his already bloody fist into the fridge. He spouted profanities, mingled with “professor” and “watch,” until he glanced over at Nick and fell silent. Nick, wiping tomato sauce from his chin, innocently asked, “What’s the matter?”

Then, as he locked eyes with the demon roommate, he found he was no longer able to keep a poker face. He jumped up, anticipating the attack, and when the Scotsman reached him, Nick let him have it.

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