Portsmouth Rhode Island Summer Part Two

Today is Tuesday January Twelfth Two Thousand Ten. Four more working days till I leave and three more cold walks to the Alewife T-station. A friend of mine told me yesterday that it was good that I was doing something for myself and that not that many people do that sort of thing. Actually, she said it a bit more eloquently than that and she seems like a smart cookie. I have to comment on the speaker at my AA mtg last nite. He celebrated a year of sobriety and is quite a character. He is also a lifetime criminal who is looking at two years in prison if he gets convicted on his latest case. He was very emotional and then had his daughter there to present his medallion. It was pretty over the top emotional but it was his nite to do that. He has come a long way and seems to be doing really well even with a prison term hanging over his head. He comes from such a completely different background than I do and it was difficult to hear his story at times.

So, back to Rhody. The night that my roommate came home with his tooth in a cup the other roommate watched the strangest fifteen minutes of television ever. First of all the program was on a channel that did not exist previously in the broadcast range. We tried to tune the channel in the next day and many following days but was not able to find it again. The program was about a guy who spent his entire life in his car; going to drive thru's for food & a carwash for his shower. All sorts of weird shit happened during the program but it ended with the car running out of gas and the guy dying. My roommate and I both remembered the same program with all of the details and could never find either it or the channel again. We were on LSD but unless we had some sort of dual mind meld hallucination it must have happened.

One night we went out to see some friends of mine and drink a shit ton of rum before the movies. Four or five of us sat around a few bottles and drank them. Everyone seemed good to go and then we went to the movies, either a Freddie or Jason movie. The place was packed so we couldn't all sit together and this turned out to be a very good thing. About ten minutes into the movie we heard some coughing and gurgling and then the sound of someone throwing up. The toothless wonder had thrown up not only all over himself but also on four to five of the people sitting directly in front of him. As people were screaming, TTW ran out of the theatre throwing up along the way. My other roommate and I slinked down in our seats and pretended not to know TTW. Remember, we were drinking rum and thats all we could smell so we ditched the movie about an hour into it. When we arrived at our cars TTW was nowhere to be found till after about twenty minutes of searching we hear some moaning coming from the back of a pickup. There he was in all of his vomit glory dry heaving in the back of some person's truck. We dragged him to our car and hightailed it out of there.

One of the challenges of living on your own and partying every day is managing your money. We all had jobs, I will write about those later but after rent, booze, and pot we didn't have much left for food. Our first stop every day was to the 7-Eleven to get a $.99 hot dog with all the fixin's. I think we ate those fucking things every day for three weeks and I have not had another one since that summer. Our next choice for nourishment was a all you can eat buffet that had lunch for $4.99. We would frequently get thrown out of there after eating for three to four hours and the same thing happened at the Wendy's Super Bar. Our last route for grub was to walk into a supermarket wearing cargo pants and we would stuff them full of meats. I will never forget the time the toothless wonder stole hot dogs and ramen while we were copping steaks and stouffers. We never got caught and many nights we dined on steaks for gratis.

One roommate and I found work at the Ark restaurant and the fools there hired us to run the pub kitchen. We did a great job but after ten straight days of work we looked at each other and asked why the fuck were we in Newport, Rhode Island and stuck in a kitchen for twelve hours a day. We quit the Ark and got jobs as deckhands for Viking Tours. The job didn't pay much but then we didn't have to do much either. We were also able to steal bottles of booze and blame it on the alcoholic bartender (now there is an amends I need to make). The highlight of our day came when the Viking Princess would dock at Hammersmith Farm and the toothless wonder would try and tie the boat up. No matter how many times we would dock he would fuck it up and the captain would rip in him not knowing he was our roommate. He had a pretty plumb job as well; tying up the boat and driving tourists back and forth from the farm to the docks.

Mike is still a good friend if mine even tho I made it hard for him to like me. I have known him since seventh grade and got to be in his wedding. He is married to a total babe who is smarter than I am and they have a two year old. Mike has done well for himself and his family in Atlanta and they may someday move to northern California. I speak to him every few months and always wish him the best. The other roommate I have not spoken to in six years or so and I don't plan to anytime soon. There are some issues between us that will never be resolved and perhaps I will write about them sometime but not today. I learned so much that summer and not all of it bad. I will never forget a picture of me on my eighteenth birthday, I am about twenty pounds underweight, brown, and have a look of nothing on my face. A week or so after that I would get my first job in technology that is responsible for my career today. After that summer I was ready to work for a year and then go to college, possibly in Florida but those are tales for another time.