8 Things

Jennie wants to know 8 things about me.

1. I have a cowlick on each side of a widow's peak. Thumper's got at least one of my cowlicks. A friend of my mother's, when I was a mere babe, enjoyed licking her thumb and forefinger and giving me an Eddie Munster 'do. Pops believes this is why I still have a widow's peak to this day.

2. When I was a pre-teen lad in suburban north Dallas, my brother, several of our friends, and I spent many hours crawling through the sewers. We'd suck in our guts and slip into a storm drain in one part of town, wind through the tunnels, and come up miles away. We occasionally took skateboards with us, lying prone with the board on our chests and our legs lifted, zipping along. When I was 13, my brother and a friend of his crawled through a sewer with a candle and ignited a leak in a natural gas line, changing their lives forever and thus ending the practice of sewer crawling for all of us.

3. I lost my virginity to the future Mrs. Rodius at the age of twenty. When I was 18, the older brother of a friend was so aghast at my admission of virginity that he insisted on taking me to a prostitute. I managed to avoid him, and the trip to the prostitute, forever after, and I never again admitted my virginity to anyone but Mrs. Rodius. Oh, and you.

4. In my early teens, a small group of friends and I were flicking matches and stomping them out in the underbrush on the fringes of a golf course. Flick, stomp, turn around, flick, stomp. Apparently we hadn't quite stomped the last one out, and we turned around to a roaring fire. We ran. We ended up at the home of an unpopular kid whom we'd abandoned as a friend several years before. He was surprised to see us, but took us in to play video games. His mother, bringing us snacks, mentioned that we smelled like smoke. We laughed nervously and said the video game console must be overheating. We never found out how much damage we may have done to the golf course.

5. When I was twelve, I let my brother's girlfriend paint me up with full makeup. She had written his name in giant letters on the wall of her bedroom with colored yarn.

6. I have a giant lump on my left pinky toe that I believe is the result of an undiagnosed break many years ago. Or maybe it's a corn. What the hell is a corn, anyway?

7. I have twice punched holes in walls, the last one in ugly siding in the bedroom of a rented apartment ten years ago. I was lucky not to break any bones on either occasion and have since learned to control my anger better.

8. When I was sixteen, I took a driver's education class, including an eye test. The test administrator told me to look into a machine and read the third line. I looked into the machine and asked, "Are you sure it's on?" I was told to get glasses. When I picked up the glasses at the Lenscrafters at the mall and put them on, I said, "You mean this is how everybody sees?" I was one of the cool kids who sat at the back of the class, and I had always assumed that nobody past the first row could actually read the chalkboard.

And I'm sorry, Jennie, I just can't bring myself to pass the taggy thingy on. I guess I'm still one of those cool kids at the back of the class who refuses to participate in the group activities. That, and of course I don't know 8 people to tag.