Jefke.com

so it seems that ACW silently egged me on to pursue the slight tangent of writing up some stories from the days of old–adventures i’d like to call them. more oft than not they are just tales of me being incredibly stupid and incredibly lucky and not having to pay the piper for such stupidity-.

His scope dare post, and the ensuing loaded at school post hits to fucking close to home i really need to tell this story. i’m pretty sure my mom no longer reads this site, but if you do mom, you might as well skip this one b/c this’ll prolly piss you off a bit. but hell all’s well that ends well, right?

oh and a general disclaimer, i think this one might get away from me, so this might be a long one. i promise to spell check before i publish it. granted we both know that spellchecking is only part of the solution, but hey baby steps.

jefke, a pint of rumplemintz, computer science class and rehab.

So for the first 3.25 years of my high school career, i didn’t drink, i was in fact straight edge. oh i didn’t have a shaved head or a super huge champion hoodie, but i liked the music and didn’t drink, or smoke, or fuck (not really be choice on that last one, but it was easy to claim it was a "choice" and make myself feel better).

you see, in my town, the super cool kids were jocks, but jocks like in john hughes films, more like the jocks in dazed and confused, they drank a shit load and smoked a lot of pot and had, well pretty much mullets actually (long in the back) and all loved the grateful dead and shit. Lacrosse was the sport in my town, and if you were good at it you could get away with murder, well not murder but certainly date rape and stealing destruction of private property. so somewhere in 9th grade or something, whilst being picked on and/or teased by said jocks, i decided that i thought that they were assholes, and i wanted to be as different from them as i could possibly be. the skaters were a much more accepting bunch (on some levels) so i tried to get in tight with them. problem was, i couldn’t skate, but like any other group, they needed a mascot/jester, and jefke has always been good at that. so i started hanging out with them. most of them were straight edge. so that’s how i found that shit. and man did i feel good. to have a moral ground to say "i reject your sports/beer/pot/asshole culture".  well it felt like it anyway. everyone needs something to cling to at 15 right?

so as we moved along in highschool things got more complicated. some skaters stopped skateing and became punks, and long with that got in to the punk related boozin and drugs. some jocks weren’t assholes. it got very confusing to me. so come senior year, i realized that 1) i’d never been drunk and 2) one really shouldn’t judge people with out knowing what they’re talking about and 3) i was pretty pissy and miserable anyway. so i decided i should get loaded. to see what all the fuss was about. first mistake right there. so a group of non jocks and non punks were having a party, with a keg (ohhhhh) and i was friendly wiht them, so several of us made overly elaborate plans to go and get in on this beer thing. i’m rambling but long story short, i had 3 keg cups, got slap happy, and had a fucking great time. so next thing you know, i’m a drinker. 

given my personality, i wasn’t satisfied with the occasional weekend beer. no  no, sir, i wanted to be loaded all the time. and why not, why wouldn’t some one want to be loaded all the time. given that it was senior year, pretty much everyone but me had established booze procurement procedures. so i simply leeched off of them.  I found that booze transcended my rigid social constructs. i was ending at parties where i would normally get beat up, but i was so plastered that again, i became something of a little mascot/jester for them too. oh yes, i have stories of me in a corner actually talking to a paper machee sphinx that someone’s little brother made for 6th grade histoyr class. oh i was a freakshow.

I became friends with this one guy, brian–i should change his name i suppose but i can’t think of anything. so anyway,  brian had been drinking for  while, and well knew about it and he sorta took me under his wing. we’d split cases of beer, or bottles of vodka or whatever. which worked out for him b/c i’d be loaded after 4 and he’d drink the other 20. now brian was a man with out a country, in so far as he could circulate amongst all of the social groups, and i leeched of that as well, to a certain extent. (i’m getting there people stay with me)

He was friendly a jock that was edging closer to the burnout side of the spectrum, and this jock, andy we’ll call him, had several older brothers…and therefore he had ID.

quick backgrounder:

so at my highschool as a senior you were able to park in a special parking lot that was, in theory, closer to the school than the normal parking lot. thing is you had to walk in through the field house (gym) and then through the cafeteria, so in  essence i was further, but still it was the senior lot. also as a senior you had the privilege of leaving school to go fetch things’ from your car. i dunno who thought that was a good idea, but man–what a bad idea. so here was our plan:

Andy would go to the liquor store and purchase some airplane bottles of rumplemintz and keep them in his car in a cooler. brian and i would pay for his booze, and the 3 of us would go to the car at lunch time and drink the minty boozey goodness and then return to finish our school days, you know, a bit more relaxed. 

So we did this once and it worked wonderfully. we all had a little bottle each, and the buzz hit right after walking through the cafeteria, and we smelled of minty lovelyness.

Never one to rest on my laurels, i suggested that we do this again, the next week, but this time lets get a pint of rumplemintz, and share it, it’ll be more than 1 little bottle, and less than say 3 little bottles each.  everyone agreed.

so andy got the bottle for us, but then got himself a coupla miller lights i think. so that left brian and i to drink the rumplemintz, ok no problem. sure, right. now brian could hold his booze, well sorta. I could not. brian knew this, and i believe he thought it’d be funny to watch me fall apart. so, with him setting the pace, we quickly passed the bottle back and forth, and in about 5 mins it was gone.

we got back to the cafeteria, as it was lunch time. adn i think i skipped eating anything (oh yes i was that smart). he started acting funny, and i remember thinking "man he’s totally playing this up". I left lunch and went to report to my after lunch class, computer science.  that’s where the shit started to happen.

i sat next to this girl, kristen, who was a pretty straight laced, focused young lady. while she didn’t achieve valedictorian, she was 2nd in the class. her long time boyfriend was going to the airforce academy on a scholarship, they were very small town footloose-ish those two. so i stagger in to class and apparently start passing out all over the place. legend has it that i kept falling forward and banging my head on my apple IIe screen.  what’s awesome is have no recollection of any of it. the struck so fast, so hard, i went from sober to completely loaded with out any of the pleasantries in between. so ms. valedictorian was sweet enough to pull my head off the screen when ever the teach walked by to check on our "10 print "jefke rulez";" programming. I have no idea how that guy didn’t notice that i was totally fucked up, maybe he did, and didn’t care, maybe he just didn’t care period, i dunno. so after that, whatever it was, i didn’t get caught.

i staggered to my locker after that, and got my shit for my next class, physics. thank god it wasn’t chemistry or something with bunsen burners. even better, it was a lecture class in physics that day.

so i pretty much crawled up to the back of the lecture hall and completely passed out. I was later told that our whacky harley riding physics teacher gave a 2 hr lecture on teenage alcoholism. but i think people were just saying that to fuck with me.

after that class, there was 1 period left to the day, and i’m told that 2 people walked me to the library and set me up to sleep in one of the huge cushy chairs they had there.  i was awakened an hr later by a sweet librarian that didn’t want me to miss the last bus.

what happened to brian? as i recall he got his shit together and had a pretty normal afternoon. i don’t think anyone even noticed that he had been boozing. 

what’s prolly most ironic, was that after i got up from the cushy chair, and got my head together, i realized i had to meet my friend al’s girlfriend to drive up to see him in rehab.  see al had been getting in to some shit, and was busted with smoking pot with another guy. naturally his parents would have to put him in to rehab for that. so, hung over from my little adventure, i drove with his girlfriend to visit him  in a full on lockdown rehab center. you’d think that would scare me straight. it was goddamned freaky in there too. no touching, no talking too quietly or loudly. but the experience was totally wasted on the wasted me. never occured to me that, hmm, i could end up in one of these places–hell maybe james frey was there—there was a guy that started fights all the time. ok i’m making that up.

hmm, i think i thought there was a whiz bang ending for this one. i guess not. well the whole minty drunkeness in school thing was enough to get me to write it. anyway. kids don’t drink in school… there i said it.