See Me Squeegee

February, 1998.  Early in the days that the crew was even together, we embarked on a roadtrip that still makes me laugh.  I don’t know that too many of us remember too much about our actual Spring Break in Fr. Lauderdale, but the drive may well be my favorite experience from college.  To set the scene, first know the cast of characters:

Dudes Car: Brent, Curt, Me, Padley. Vehicle: Ford Explorer.

Girls Car: Katie, Stephanie, Leanne, Jill. Vehicle: some compact rental…think Ford Escort.  Note: Alexa flew down to meet us.

(and, yeah, we had dudes and girls cars…weird, I know)

Now, to get a full idea of how this would go down, you have to know the people.  Katie was the social director – the whole trip was her idea, she organized beautifully for the girls, and we dudes just glommed on to it and tagged along.  Stephanie, Leanne, and Jill were just cool to hang out with – easygoing, beer drinkers, great conversationalists on most  topics.  Just a great carload of humanity there.  In our car, Padley was just a tall, happy-go-lucky fellow – such a good dude, never a bad word to say about anyone, and always happy to be around people and hanging  out.  You’ve read about Curt – he’s the hard luck star of “Curt Loses His Coat” and “The Chicken Boots”.  Bad things happen to Curt for some reason.  He’s nice to a fault, generous like nobody’s business…you couldn’t script a better roommate.  And then there was Brent, the wild card.  Looked exactly like Napoleon Dynamite at the time (his words, actually), had a little bit of a temper on him, could play all roles – the great guy to hang out and watch sports with or the loose cannon you knew was going to get himself in trouble.  Brent’s antics include:  punching out every window we passed on our way to a party the last day we were in the dorms; getting lost in Toledo trying to buy weed even though he doesn’t smoke; sitting silently, rocking back and forth, having torn apart a wooden massage toy/tool thing, inconsolable for hours…because a frat party wouldn’t let his buddy in.  Tremendous guy to have in the mix for a situation like this and a great guy in general, but his antics would play a major role here.

We left Michigan on a Saturday morning to caravan down from Ann Arbor, and things started smoothly. Brent was driving his Ford Explorer, the girls were in their car, we were holding up signs when we wanted to communicate back and forth (between the two cars we had one “car phone” – this was before cell phones got big), the music was going well.  We stopped around Cincinnati to get gas – the girls’ smaller car had a smaller tank – and either Curt or Padley took the wheel in our car.  Brent didn’t like giving up control of his ride and even protested a little, so the next time one of the girls had to use the bathroom Brent took the car over again.  He would not give it up the rest of the 24-ish hour drive down.

We cruised through Tennessee into Atlanta, ate something at a Waffle House somewhere in that stretch, and it was dark out from Georgia on down.  Brent entertained all of us by setting the cruise control at 69 for a good stretch, baffling the girls who wanted to make good time in the other car and thought he was being overly careful while we cackled laughing in the back.  And soon we crossed into the Florida panhandle, stopped for gas and felt the southern warmth on our skin even thought it was close to midnight  Life was good.

About an hour from Orlando, we hit a freaking monsoon.  Brent had been driving for a healthy dozen hours straight or so at this point and we were all eyes up to the front windshield trying to help him see.  We lost contact with the girls, we couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of the car, and the storm stayed ugly for a good 40 minutes or so…until we broke through the other side and things started to get clear again.  It was well after midnight now, but we figured we’d be all the way down to our hotel by early morning to sleep it off on the beach and get Spring Break off to a good start.  We slowed up a little, reconnected with the girls, and it was smooth sailing…until traffic stopped dead.

(Note – the story is about to get good)

As it turned out, the road was shut so they could clear an accident.  We sat for maybe a half-hour waiting, and during that time Katie came up alongside the driver’s window to say hello.  She knocked, Brent rolled down the window, and after saying hello she mentioned “Hey, your back left tire looks a little low; you may want to check it out next time we get gas”.   Brent, ever the charmer, replied “Stick to your dolls and let the men do the driving,” rolling up his window.  Katie stared at us, we all shrugged, and soon enough the road started moving again and we figured we’d patch things up at the next stop.  Which would come sooner than we thought…

About 45 minutes later, the girls started flashing their brights and honking, so we pulled over and they told us the news: evidently when Katie got out of the car she had knocked her wallet off the seat and lost it outside.  In her wallet she had about $500 in cash for the trip – a fortune for college students – and without it she was broke for the week, plus as kids we didn’t know what happened if you lost a credit or debit card or anything like that.  We’d have to turn back, but we were on the Florida Turnpike where exits only come up every 35-40 miles.  So we had to drive on another 15 miles or so, get off and get back on in the opposite direction, pass the accident area by several miles, get off and get on again, and try to figure out where Katie left her wallet.

That’s right: we had to return to a general area of the highway.  To find a black wallet.  On a blacktop road.  In the middle of the night.

When we got to the area, there was still one police car there filing accident paperwork, so we knew we were in the right zone.  He told us that he’d leave his police lights on so that people would be cautious while we drove up and down the shoulder with our brights on trying to illuminate the road.  And we did, for well over a half hour, watching the ditches for alligators, swatting insects, and hoping against hope.  And miraculously – Curt found it!  (Of course he did – his bad luck is personal…he’s actually good luck for everyone else)  We celebrated, took pictures, and got  back in the cars triumphantly, happy to have such a good Spring Break story only on day one.  And so when the girls needed gas a couple exits later we took in the sunrise, felt the warm air, and felt pretty good about ourselves.  Well, all but one of us did.

Brent refused to even pull up to the pump.  By his estimation we were maybe 100 miles out and he had enough gas to get there, and why should he bother pumping gas when “it was the girls’ fault that they wasted all that gas chasing wallets”.  So we got back to his car in a parking spot, waited for the girls to finish fueling up, and followed them out of the gas station and back onto the highway…

In the wrong direction.  They got on the turnpike North instead of South.

And with the exits so far apart we might not have noticed it until one of the girls remarked “hey, wasn’t the sun on the other side of the freeway before we got gas?”.  We pulled over, determined that – again – we’d need to get off 10-15 miles down the road, get back on again, and recover the same ground.  Brent, mind you, was still driving – his hair having gotten at least an inch or two poofier since the wallet situation…it got about a half inch poofier per hour by my calculation at the time.

We got back on after the backtrack/looparound, and finally headed south again.  We passed another exit and as we were moving past Curt asked Brent how he was doing on gas.  Brent said he was fine and we cruised past, but then we clicked his overhead info station a few times to see that we had something like 26 miles until empty.  Within a minute, we saw a sign “next exit/services: 38 miles” or something absurdly farther than what we had left.  So Brent kicked into gear:

Fearing that any touching of the brakes would require him to re-accelerate and burn more precious fuel, he refused to brake.  He passed on shoulders, leaned on the horn as we approached slower cars, and drove maniacally as we looked out the rear window at the girls’ surprise.  What was this madman doing?

This continued for 30+ miles, a no-sleep-or-rest-in-24-hours Brent flying down the highway as terrified to use his brakes as we were of his driving.  And soon enough we could see the Shell logo beckoning a mile down the road at the next exit.  We were going to make it!  But Brent wasn’t so sure.  Ignoring the fact that even if we coasted to a halt on the exit ramp it would be a 10-minute transaction to walk there, get a gas can, and get back (or just push the car there), he took that exit ramp at easily 50 miles an hour.  It felt like we were on two wheels, all of us were pressed up against the driver’s side from the G-force, and as we straightened out to get to the toll booth we were still pushing at least 25-30 mph.  As the toll booth woman’s eyes widened at the barreling-down Explorer, we wondered how this would end.  Would she lift the gate?  Would we plow through it?  Would it stop us or shatter the front end?  She must have hit the gate lift button because the gate opened as we cruised through, but not before Brent threw a wad of bills from his pocket out his window at hers, yelling as an explanation of his lunacy:

“Lady, we’re fucked!”

Postscript: We did make it down to Ft. Lauderdale and we had a good week as far as I remember. Beaches, basketball games, dinners, lots of drinks, lots of late night drinks and singalongs on the beach.  Just a good trip.  And it mellowed old Brent out some, so much that as we crossed the state line from Florida into Georgia on the return trip, he offered to abdicate the driver’s seat and let Padley take a turn at the helm.  And within 20 minutes, Padley controlled a blowout and coasted us to the shoulder for safety.

The very rear left tire that Katie had warned us about a week earlier had blown out.

In a recent dinner with some (most?  There were two…) of my loyal readers, the central theme of this CW Chronicles series came up:  some of our  best stories need never be forgotten, but some were never fully known in the first place.  So for posterity and entertainment, I vow for 2013 to be the year for all of these to be recorded for posterity.  Curt’s broken wrist ix next up, but for today one of my all-time favorites and one of the lesser-known Curt stories:  The Chicken Boots.

If I had a few adjectives to describe Curt, most would be synonyms for “wonderful”, at least a few would be sophomorically homoerotic because that was just the kind of humor we all used at the time, but the other big two would be:

-Hardworking

-Unlucky

And The Chicken Boots summarizes them both fantastically. During the 1999-2000 school year (Tom Brady’s senior year…) Curt worked at least a few nights a week at the butcher/deli counter at Plymouth Marketplace, about 15 miles from Ann Arbor back in our hometown. He had finally declared a major (something ecological…in the School of Natural Resources and Environment) and was working pretty hard to fit in a ton of credits.  So he’s work late to close up Marketplace, get home even later because it was a 20-30 minute drive, study until he passed out, and get up before most of us housemates to get to classes early.

One night, he was hoping to get out of Marketplace pretty early because of a big next day, so he volunteered to help the other staffers take out the garbage to close things up.  The only thing – that night the guy on garbage duty hadn’t double-bagged the bag of meat scraps, and so as Curt walked to the dumpster the bag broke, dripping day-old chicken guts and refuse-meat sludge all over his Timberlands.  Not a huge deal, so he scooped up what he could, dropped it all in the Dumpster, helped clean up the mess, and jumped in his car to get back to campus for a little studying for a quiz the next day before turning in.

Except…once he had been in his car for a few minutes he realized – his boots now stunk to high hell, mostly of what he described as “chicken juice”.  He cracked a window, drove fast, and when he got home he left his boots outside on the porch to air/dry out while he studied for his quiz, passed out in bed with a coursepack next to him, and woke up the next morning for two consecutive classes.  The first was a quiz in one of his major requirements; the second was the day they were being fitted for wading boots for some river labs they’d complete later in the semester.

Waking up a little late and a little groggy, he got dressed, looked for his boots, remembered he had left them outside, and walked to the door with a full backpack and a mind full of crammed quiz knowledge.  He threw on his boots on his way out the door, trudged up to campus, sat down in his class a minute or two before it started, and then realized…

It stinks in here.

It stinks in here, and it’s my boots.

It stinks in here, it’s my boots, and everyone’s starting to figure out where it’s coming from.

It stinks in here, it’s me, everyone knows, but I can’t leave because I have to take this quiz.  Do I sacrifice my own grades for the sake of common courtesy?  Or do I go on the rest of the semester with a B+ average as “the stinky kid”.

Now, quick aside here – Curt had a history of leaving the room during exams and sacrificing his education as a result.  During freshman orientation and the foreign language placement test, Curt – who had straight A’s through five years of Spanish – left the room to use the restroom, got lost and couldn’t find his way back to the right classroom, failed the test and subsequently had to take four semesters of Spanish beginning with level one.  I’m not sure if this was on his mind when he made his boot-stink decision, but he decided to stick it out and take the quiz.

Naturally, the professor waits until  toward the end of class to give the quiz, and so a half hour into class Curt has offended anyone within sniffing distance.  The quiz comes, Curt takes it quickly, and as soon as he’s done he excuses himself and gets out of there.  He wants to run home, or just become another Shakey Jake and go barefoot to his next class…but he can’t.  That’s the day they’re fitting him – OVER his boots – for waders for the river project.   His boots stink yet he’s REQUIRED to wear hiking boots to his next class, which starts in about a half-hour.

Now, if I get one more adjective for Curt it’s some kind of hyphenated “way-too-nice-and-considerate-for-his-own-good” word.  He can’t fathom having anyone on a knee measuring his feet with his boots smelling like that, so he has to buy a new pair.  But the only place nearby that he can even imagine would have hiking boots is the over-priced Bivouac store on State Street.  He resigns himself to his fate, runs into Bivouac – still smelling like holy hell – and finds the cheapest pair of boots they have (something in the $125 range or so in 1999 dollars).  But…they don’t have those in his size.  So he goes to the next cheapest, and repeats a few times until they find one that fits…and he ends up spending something like $200 for a pair of boots he doesn’t even like.  Just so he doesn’t offend everyone in his class with The Chicken Boots.

My favorite part of the story: seeing these kind-of-ugly boots on him later in the day and asking “hey, new boots?”, and having him grimace and tell the whole story.  The written version can’t capture that and I apologize…but the defeated, “I should have expected this” look in his eyes…that’s Classic Curt.

Thanks to a fantastic college reunion this weekend – congrats to Alexa and Jeff; “where you at?” to Curt and Brent; and good seeing you to Katie and all the ADPi girls – I want to kick off the week by introducing a recurring feature on this blog, The CW Chronicles.  We’ll go with CW because a dozen years after college we should probably clean up the language a little bit, but ultimately it’s the vulgar-ish nickname that grew to encompass an entire group of friends for college, even though it began as simply an insult hurled at them by one Bryan Sperling.

Anyway, in these chronicles I’ll play Herotodus to our adventures from college, saving for posterity our most beloved stories and hopefully introducing non-college-friend readers to a terrific era: Late 90s, Ann Arbor, Michigan in the infancy of the internet, just before cell phones, as seen through the eyes of some decent students who enjoyed a good time.

In these posts you’ll learn about Curt, my college roommate and one of the more entertaining characters from this group; Brent, who looks and acts just like Napoleon Dynamite and who rivals Curt for funniest suite of stories; the aforementioned Katie and Alexa; Todd, the Rhino; the ADPi girls and the Vaughan/Sylvan Street girls, maybe some #7 girls and some Lahser kids.  You’ll hear about the Lawn Gnome, the Chicken Boots, the Lady We’re Effed roadtrip and plenty of others.  But I’ll begin with my personal favorite: Curt Loses His Coat.

Curt Loses His Coat

It’s hard to think of a better day to have been a student at Michigan than the day we beat Ohio State in November, 1997 to win the Big Ten championship, remain undefeated, and play for the national championship.  That day was insane – we were #1, Ohio State was #3, we woke up to a light dusting of snow and perfect football weather…  The student section was fuller than ever – that season, freshmen received “split” tickets because of too much demand, so only half of freshmen actually had tickets to that game.  But through the wonders of college ingenuity, nearly all of them got in with forged tickets or sneak attacks on the gates.  The dorms were full of visitors – everyone had friends who wanted to be near campus that day.  Parking was impossible within a mile of the stadium (this will be important later) and so lucky us – students and student ticketholders living a ten minute walk from the stadium on the day of the biggest game that Michigan has played in my lifetime.

As most of you know, Michigan hung on to win 20-14 behind the strength of a Charles Woodson Heisman-clinching punt return TD and an interception return by Andre Weathers.  We students rushed the field, braving pepper spray and security to run wild on the turf and celebrate with players and other fans. I can’t do this moment justice in words, but trust me…no student there will ever forget it.

And here’s where the tale of Curt’s coat begins, with this amazing Saturday as the backdrop.  Naturally I lost contact with everyone I knew – remember…NO Cell Phones yet! – and so hours later after squeezing as much joy as possible from the experience, I got back to my dorm room, filled with visitors, revelers, nappers, whoever, and saw Curt packing a backpack on his way out the door.  Why?  Why would a man leave campus on this greatest-day-of-all-time?

It harkens back a few months to when Curt selected his class schedule.  He’s as conscientious as they come, taking challenging courses and studying like crazy.  His schedule was already burdened by tough college-level Spanish classes, interesting because he and I were in the same Spanish classes all through high school, yet I passed out of the university requirement on the entrance test, and Curt didn’t.  Why?  Curt had to go to the restroom during his placement test, got lost, and wasted 45 minutes trying to find the classroom again so he flunked it and had to take four semesters of college Spanish.  Curt is unlucky like that, as this story will prove.  So Curt is packing his schedule with challenges and decides to take a “fun” elective – introductory black/white photography.

That class would be the bane of his existence the entire fall semester.  He should have known – on the first day the professor even remarked that most people take this class as a fun elective blowoff, but if that was anyone’s intention they should drop the class immediately.  Curt, unwisely, soldiered on.  Now, remember – this is Ann Arbor in 1997 during the grunge era.  Britney Spears wouldn’t emerge on the scene for another few months to fill our world with pop-based happiness.  This is still an angst-ridden period for many, particularly on a college campus where that “no one understands or respects us” agenda can brood among people who identify or want to identify with a downtrodden group.  And Curt’s class was almost entirely filled with these people – Curt hated class.  Instead of group photo projects taking pictures around the Diag, it was all dark…his groups were full of wannabe tortured artists.  Curt suffered all semester.

And what was getting him more than anything was some project for which he needed to use a computer program that he couldn’t figure out.  I remember this as a group project – not sure that’s entirely true but bear with me – for which Curt was in charge of the computer component because, lucky him, he had his own computer (again…1997. Having your own computer was unique).  And after a week or so of struggling he had mentioned this to his mother, who had a solution:

Curt’s parents’ neighbor worked for IBM.  Curt would meet with this neighbor on Saturday afternoon after the football game and figure out his problem, then come back to campus to celebrate with us.  Not ideal, but understandable. IBM guy to the rescue.  So Curt got in his car, we promised to leave him a note of where we were headed if we left for the evening before he got back, and he took off to solve his computer problem under the expert tutelage of an IBM employee.

Now, while Curt was gone for several hours, a few friends and I – Curt’s crew had he been around – had  the night of our lives.  The dorms were still buzzing, and eventually we found ourselves at the house party of starting quarterback Brian Griese and half the football team.  Drinks were flowing, congratulations everywhere, the prettiest girls on campus were in the best mood they could be in.  Unbelievable night.  It ended, as many readers will remember, just after I went out in the yard to piss around 3am or something, noticed a guy vomiting next to me, and realized it was Griese.  So I threw a few fingers down my throat and vomited with him so that I could boast, as I still do, that I PUKED WITH GRIESE AFTER THE OHIO STATE GAME!!!  Anyway, epic night.  And where was Curt?

Curt was, indeed, meeting with an IBM employee.  This neighbor was employed by the computer giant…as a janitor.  Knew nothing about computers.  But he was proud of his job and gave Curt a tutorial of the years-old computer in his house.  Lessons like “this is a mouse and this is a keyboard” and “here’s how you load paper into the printer”. And Curt, ever the too-nice guy, couldn’t cut him off.  He sat and took his kindergarten computer lesson for well over an hour.  Then had dinner with his parents, kindly thanked his mother for the lesson, and drove back to campus, all told having lost at least 5-6 hours of his day in the exchange.  Having done so, he decided to go to the computer lab and finish this thing once and for all, then celebrate over beers with us.  But first, he had to park, and couldn’t get near campus on such a busy day, so he parked a healthy mile or two away – down by Briarwood Mall – and trudged up to central campus.

Now – an aside I should tell you.  I got this sequence of events on Sunday in the late afternoon, when Curt returned to our dorm room wearing a new coat.  Imagine finishing the most insanely fun weekend of your college career and not seeing your roommate at all during it, then having him walk in with a bag of groceries and a new  coat.  This wasn’t Curt returning from a party that didn’t quit.  This was inexplicable.  And here’s how the rest of the story goes.

Curt got back to our dorm room sometime around 9pm Saturday night, and we were gone.  He saw our note that we were out celebrating at Oakland and Hill, and he figured that since he’d already invested so much time in this due-on-Monday project he ought to finish it.  Oh, and by the way – Monday was the Monday of Thanksgiving week.  No class was doing anything important that week…most students were flying home on Tuesday or Wednesday.  Curt had the lone angst-ridden class that had big projects due mid-semester the week of Thanksgiving.  And so Curt walked over the to campus computer center – the Fishbowl – at Angell Hall.  Now, no one in his right mind was studying on this epic night.  There were a few weirdos there (and North Campus was probably packed, but that’s just North Campus) but this was late Saturday night, the week of Thanksgiving, after a huge win over Ohio State.  Curt was one of a handful of losers at the computer lab.

Which was great, because the staff there was able to help him figure a few things out, he made some progress with his project, and sometime well after midnight he figured that at least he was done.  He’d probably not get to party with everyone but he’d at least be finished.  And so he made some last adjustments, determined that he was satisfied, pressed “Print” and walked to the bank of printers.  Happy with the printout he walked back to his computer and discovered…

Someone had stolen his coat.

Someone had stolen his coat. Out of the empty computer lab.  His coat was gone, after midnight in late November in Michigan.  He had only left his chair for 2-3 minutes tops in an EMPTY ROOM.  But his coat was gone and his night would get worse.  Defeated, he walked over a mile back to his car – with NO COAT because it had been stolen – drove the half-hour back to Canton, and spent the next day coat shopping with his mom.

As you’ll learn in later chronicles, Curt’s wardrobe is peppered with items he purchased after or to avoid a crisis.  Nearly every article of clothing tells a story.  But none to me is more emblematic of the Curt Experience than that coat.  I’ve never had a more fun night in college and I’d bet that most of us would say the same.  Curt didn’t get that night.  He didn’t even get to drink a beer at 4am and listen to us describe it.  Curt walked over a mile to his car in short sleeves without a coat, then got to spend the day at Burlington Coat Factory buying a new jacket.  That, in a nutshell, is Curt.