It's a wonder we weren't killed

Spending time over the weekend with some old friends of mine (Trav, Katie, Missy, and Michelle) got me to thinking about some of the ridiculous things we all did as teenagers. We are all lucky adults, considering some of the stunts we pulled, some of the people we associated with, some of the ass whoopins we totally deserved yet managed to slither out of.

Case in point: It was a Friday night, in good ole Hogtown, and myself, along with my twin bro Bruce and our buddy Travis, were handing out in the parking lot in town called Beaumont Plaza. As sad as it sounds, it was the cornerstone of any weekend activity. At Beaumont Plaza, we would get in our cars (as many people as we could fit in, preferably with a higher female-to-male ratio), and literally cruise around in a loop in a desperate attempt to find something better to do, which usually occurred after a couple hours of wasting gas and/or time. This particular Friday evening, the three of us couldn't have hand-picked a bigger collection of panty wastes and douchebags (us included) to be hanging out with if we wanted to. I am not exaggerating when I say to you we looked like the incoming class from Revenge of the Nerds. Hopefully, I would have been considered the Lewis or Gilbert of the bunch; but most likely I was that weird guy who picked his nose ad infinitum. At the time, I was the biggest one there, and I weighed 160 pounds.

So, there we were,hanging out around our vehicles, waving and talking to people, hoping to be noticed. And noticed we were. We were aligned up in a row, with me and my brother on one end, and the rest of us exponentially getting shorter and skinnier as the line went. I think the last one of us was a buck 0-eight dripping wet.

A couple of guys come up and begin making trouble. One of them, Mitchell Searcy, was probably the oldest sophomore in recorded time. He could purchase his own alcohol, and, as a matter of fact, did just that previously that evening. He was drunk as hell and ready to whip some scrawny nerd ass (insert us here). He grabs the neck of the Jack Daniel's bottle (c'mon loser, you a Kentuckian, at least threaten us with a bottle of Kentucky bourbon like Jim Beam), and repeatedly proceeds to ask all eight or nine of us, "You want me to bust you gawddammed head? I'll bust your gawddammed head!" He says this to every one of us, raising his bottle even higher as he walked. Even in the face of danger and quite imminent and certain death, we cannot stop laughing. To not crack up laughing in his face was one of the biggest test of wills I have ever faced. Mitchell Searcy, like a drill seargant gone berzerk, ruched down to Travis and got about one inch from his face. Bourbon soaked spittle was flying everywhere. I know as much as I am sitting here that if Trav wasn't wearing glasses, he would have suffered permanent visual loss that night. Somehow, Trav always managed to take the blunt of everything, and tonight was no exception.

Maybe it was his continual smirk plastered on his face; maybe it was the fact that although half the Redneck's size, he wasn't frightened in the least; maybe it was that he most likely mumbled derogatory insults pertaining to the female anatomy (insert the p-word) toward the Redneck and his friend - we will never know. What we do know is that we miraculously got off without so much as a hair out of place, and, about a quarter of a mile and an hour or so later, it took 4-6 large police officers to subdue a maniacal drunkard none other than Mitchell Searcy. He was kicking his way out of the police cruiser so violently we could hear it from our end of Beaumont plaza. I heard later he got his face bitten off while in prison, so I guess things indeed do come around full circle.

It was one of the funniest moments of our misspent youth. More stories to come.