the pot of fool’s gold at the end of the rainbow

So much of my life has become defined for me by what I shouldn’t have been doing when I should have been sleeping. Sometimes, the emphasis is on the activity itself, but more often than not, it’s about the fallout. The repercussions. The aftermath. Which could be major, surely, especially when I was a good deal younger. Though, ultimately, most of it has merely been mundane.

Goddammit.

Oh, the lie of the big finish, and how, over the years, it’s twisted me into knots I’ve spent untold hours futilely attempting to untangle. Because most of existence, if we survive it long enough to talk about it using such grandiose words as “existence,” is consumed not with that sexy sense of suspense and possibility that charges our naïve engines in our teens and 20s, but instead with the inexorable slide into ranch-styles, wedding rings and rosaries, into time-clocks, 3,000-mile oil changes, seeping lawns and chipped dishes. 

Which is all to say: Gather ye your stupid where and while ye may.

Just do not mistake what follows as any sideways attempt at self-aggrandizement. This is simple cataloging of ill-fated events and often exceptionally boneheaded decisions, and it comes way, way too easily:

>>> Teenage nights, pre-driver’s license, wandering with a buddy around local golf courses, pulling up flags, followed by the gross exorcism of gross wine. And by exorcism, I mean tasting the wine again through my nose (which only enhances the flavor). And by tasting, I mean puking, yes. And by gross, I mean cheap. And by cheap, I do very much mean Boon’s Farm, because as a 14-year-old of most discriminating palate, I drew the line at Mad Dog 20/20.

>>> That whole thing with the rum, and the dancing, and the mailboxes, and the angry old dude in the bathrobe and slippers, and the overabundance of blue-light enforcement of the idea that 14-year-old boys should not be so flagrantly besotted in public. And my literal partner in crime that night tearing up a pair of blue jeans he’d borrowed from one of my sisters. And the unfortunately encountered gaggle of Campus Crusaders for Christ, who were particularly humorless in front of that ECU College Hill dorm, helping to explain our soon-to-arrive police escort, who would be even more humorless still …

>>> That one time, freshmen year in college, five of us taking off to the beach, the night before Thanksgiving, with me pounding down a pint of something vaguely whiskey, among other things, to where I was later walking waist-deep and fully clothed in the moonlit autumn ocean; it was not at all warm that night. Then, just before dawn, after once again losing the battle with my belly over the value of my earlier rotgut sour-mash decision, I was belting out every aching word to The Who’s Quadrophenia as we listened to it on my boombox, huddled up against the dune line, the cold ocean wind whipping at us but good.

>>> Thanksgiving dinner that next day at the home of one of my compatriots (now, alas, gone), with his parents and the rest of his family, was the very model of a modern major hangover (belated apologies to all of them, both living and dead, and also to Gilbert and Sullivan).

>>> The insanely caffeinated wee-hours studying my badly flummoxed brains out as a junior at Carolina, fighting for the opportunity to spend my senior year abroad, in England. Working at the time 25-30 hours a week at the Record Bar at University Mall, while taking 21 credit hours of classes. Living in that chilly, damp Franklin Street garage apartment with the bread-stealing mouse, and the shrimp crickets. Damn the shrimp crickets!

>>> That night in Chapel Hill when I succumbed, one final time, to imbibing the rainbow, even after the rainbow had resoundingly kicked my hipster-less ass on two previous inglorious occasions. (In my defense: Skittles should really be required to post a strong warning on its packaging. Wretched rainbows). One minute I was dancing to R.E.M.’s wonderfully ragged take on The Clique’s “Superman” with an attractive young woman at a ‘60s-themed campus party — with me dressed, belligerently, as a ’50s greaser, having very stupidly used Vaseline as pomade, for an experience that, by the next day, was full-on Dippity Dumbass — and the next I was arm-in-claw with a human-sized lizard in a cotton flower-print dress, straight out of a Ralph Steadman fever-dream. Even as I backed away from this close reptilian encounter at song’s end, I was becoming profoundly convinced that one of my eyeballs was about to throb straight out of my skull; I could hear that tiny tattletale heart pounding like John Bonham’s own kick drum, so loud I feared other people would hear it, too, and start pointing at me, and then chasing me, to who only knows what ugly end. A short time later, after fleeing on foot back to my cold little garage apartment to face two baskets of washed, but still-unfolded, clothes that simply weren’t going to put themselves away, I was consumed by the conviction that I needed to die, immediately, followed by the overwhelming sense that every option for offing myself was simply too exhausting to undertake; I live today only on account of that temporary, wholly uncharacteristic lack of work ethic. So I just sat there on the dirty indoor/outdoor carpet amid the jumbled clean clothes, bawling my head off instead.

 The evening was capped off by me dodging suddenly manifesting men made of light standing in the 4 a.m. road on my way to my buddy Scott’s duplex, after he called me in a mildly angry tirade, realizing all at once that I’d vanished on him at the earlier party, and insisting I get my butt over there — surmising, all too correctly, that I couldn’t be trusted with navigating a very vivid rainbow on my own. Shortly after arriving at Scott’s, everyone there wandered off to bed, leaving me sitting up alone, waiting several wide-awake hours before heading off to the University Mall Record Bar, where I was scheduled to work a little later that same morning, until 1 p.m., and where a kindly co-worker, a bass-playing, corduroy-wearing hippy named Thomas, took one look at my pupils still the size of dinner plates (friggin’ Skittles), and stuck me as far away from customers as he could, over in the classical section, alphabetizing albums and tapes (that’s what we played music on back then, kids). The highlight of that day was, immediately after work, having my hair washed with Comet cleanser (seriously) by a flamboyantly angry hair stylist in thick rubber gloves. And then, back in my apartment, I crashed for 15 hours straight.

The moral of this story? There is no moral to this story. Friggin’ rainbows. 

>>> Those 2 and 3 a.m. stumbles through beer-urine-soaked downtown Manchester, England, mistaking one more Guinness drunk that would later end in bed spins and heaving-up Ireland’s tar-black pride for romanticism and an expat’s longing for home. I was never really expatriated, from anything, of course. Believing so was just what passed for my romanticism at the time.

Then I came home to the U.S.A, broke and exhausted, a sickly shambles of my former self (post-dysentery and my life’s second case of chickenpox, which had me hospitalized under doctor’s orders, and in pitiful shape, in a terrifying old former military facility on the outskirts of Manchester), and pined only for where I’d been. The grass indeed is greener on the other side of … whatever. 

>>> Retreating mid-December, 1990, from an ill-fated move to Miami Beach, sometime around 2 a.m., with everything I then owned crammed into my ’86 Honda Accord, no sleep in more than 30-some hours and several Jolt Colas poured into my angry gut (I used to love those little 12-ounce heart-rockets; Monster? Red Bull? Pshaw!), only to pass out cold roughly five head-nodding hours later, seconds after blindly navigating my car to a halt and cutting the ignition in a parking spot at the 1-95 rest stop outside of St. Augustine.

Two full days of driving onward, with an overnight stop at my parents’ place here in Greenville, and I was standing in snow flurries on the icy shore of Lake Erie in northern Ohio, the coldest wind I’ve ever felt cutting right through me like the sudden awful realization that I hadn’t so much as a clue who I was, or where I was truly bound.

>>> Running, a little after 3 a.m., that one balmy Christmas morn in my 20s, up Charles Street here in Greenville, past what was then still the old tobacco warehouses, with a slow police escort for close to a half-mile, because no sane person up to any good, apparently, goes running at a little after 3 a.m. on Christmas. 

>>> All-nighters as features editor at the Citizen newspaper in Key West. Many due to outright equipment failures (as in computer, and brain, as in the newspaper’s, and my own, respectively. Often the two failed in tandem, creating an even unholier mess.) That said, for all the sleep I then missed, I still never missed a deadline. And driving home with a head full of its own exhaust fumes on a glorious Key West morning was actually, at times, wonderfully surreal. Except that one time during the hurricane. That was just terrifying.

>>> Jon Stewart. Stephen Colbert. Futurama. Archer. A TiVo with a backlog of all that, and more. An insomnia problem and a weekday 5:20 a.m. wakeup call. Should you care to do the math here, it will not add up to anything healthy, wealthy or wise.

So often now, thinking back over my past, I cannot help but marvel at the sheer persistence of stupid — especially since my youthful conviction for drinking to some excess was resoundingly dismissed, nearly every single time, by my body’s own more fervent conviction that processing all that alcohol was simply not part of its job description. 

And let me say that stupid can surely do a lot to keep you up at night. Though don’t misunderstand me: There was a bumper-crop of fun back there in my messy, often misspent youth. There’s often a lot of fun in stupid. Which doesn’t, in any way, make it any less stupid.

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