Third Times the Charm
I’m not sure why, but whenever I fly I always get stuck next to the worst people possible. Right now I somehow am sitting next to a man who only the politest people possible would call lethargic. My right hand is currently being over taken by his equally upsetting wife. She asks me if I want any gum. Damn I knew it. The worst kind. Just as I want to start deciding what would be funnier, if they a) had to add a seat belt attachment or b) if they ordered extra-lunch, she has to be polite. I have a sneaking suspicion they both own the Chinese-made ab-belt advertised at four in the morning on the worst tv channels. I have a feeling that both eat processed food everyday and can’t understand why it isn’t working. I have a suspicion that they both voted Republican last election. It looks like I’ll be playing the part of the size four dress that the size eight bridesmaid tries to fit into for this flight.
“Please put your tray table up and return to the upright position.” the 51 year old flight attendant says. She has this weird way of saying things. There’s no doubt in my mind that every time words leave her mouth she’s imagines she’s in a smoky comedy club. The look on her face makes me believe that she thinks she is destroying the crowd with her acerbic wit and references to airline food. Some people, mostly people who arrive at the Sizzler at 4:15, agree. Right now I despise these people, despise my life. In just under three hours I’ll be arriving in Missoula, MT. After that I’ll wait in an airport lobby that was constructed entirely out of wood. After that I’ll board a van driven by a 22 year old girl, who in terms of body type, quite possibly could be related to the people I'm currently sitting next too. I’ll later find out that she has a thing for fifty five year old men with incredible moustaches who are only reachable at four in the morning and drive a rusty pick-up truck with no back gate. She will then drive me two uncomfortable hours to my home for the next ten weeks. This of course, is all inconsequential, because right now all I can think about is how I wish my life were a movie.
Right now I wish I were sitting next a girl. Preferably 21. Preferably flying home for the summer after a year at college. Preferably with objectionable morals and an ex-boyfriend she wants to upset. She would have shoulder length brunette hair. She would be beautiful. Think Pam Beasely, not Megan Fox. We would make small talk. I’d ask about her major, she’d say English. I’d say Economics/Politics. She’d be impressed. She’d ask for a blanket. I’d put my hand seductively between her skirt.
“Sir, would you like anything to drink.”
“Sure, I’ll take a Diet Pepsi.”
This exchange is upsetting. Mostly because she interrupted my daydream, partly because I don’t know why I ordered anything, I don’t even like soda.
“How about you sir?”
My pudgy companion is eager to reply.
“I’ll take a packet of Peanut M&Ms and a Reese Peanut Butter…And ummm a Pepsi. Wait, make it a Diet Pepsi.”
Yes, please order the Diet. Hopefully he’s secretly suicidal and it’s for the cancer causing ingredients and not this newfound focus on health. I’ve never understood why people order diet sodas after gorging themselves. It’s not like the extra two hundred or so calories is really going to make a difference, but then again, who am I to judge. I’m on a plane en route to an unpaid internship in Montana for realistically no rhyme or reason. Well I guess there’s a reason. I need the internship to graduate, but really I could have gone somewhere a lot easier to get to. Somewhere that wasn’t located in a small Montana town, two hours from Missoula Montana and 75 minutes from Anacanda. I think rich people from out east would call the place quant and beautiful. They would vacation there once a year in the endless bed and breakfasts. Buy their neighbors a cowboy hat and tell stories about the time a local called them partner. But to me, it just seemed like the kind of place you had to drive an hour to get to buy beer. Beer you couldn’t even drink on the campus.
The reason you couldn’t drink beer on the campus was actually straight out of a movie. The organization was run by an old politician, who ran and lost against a very prominent Republican a few years back. He lost mainly because the guy who beat him described him in his memoir as, “Incredibly good looking and terminally odd.” Which quite honestly is probably the best way to describe a guy who currently spends his day aimlessly wandering around Montana telling interns that their glasses tell him he’s a vegetarian.
A few years back the man best described as “Incredibly good looking and terminally odd” entered the dwellings of his thirty some interns only to find a large amount of them having sex. Not like normal, casual, awkward, sex, that college kids take part of daily, but the kind of sex you can only find in movies that are sold in paper bags or starring Christian Bale. The only thing this incident was missing was an intern dropping a chainsaw down forty flights of stairs. After this, hard alcohol was banned. I guess when college kids can only drink beer they don’t have orgies interrupted by ex-Senate candidates. Sadly, later that summer one of the male interns turned himself into the small Montana town’s police station for raping a fellow intern. Except the girl that was allegedly raped said the confessed rapist did not rape her, but rather she wanted to have sex. Needless to say, alcohol was banned on campus.
This left myself in an odd situation. I’m thoroughly convinced that there are only a few ways to actually get to know someone. The best is clearly hallucinogens. But since this was Montana, the only drug readably available was Meth, and last time I checked Meth simply made you ugly and more likely to live in rural towns and enjoy cold weather. None of which particularly interested me. So alcohol was the only answer. Except I was living an hour from a bar, in a place where almost no-one was 21 and booze was banned.
This meant I actually had to talk to people, people who were undoubtedly a lot more committed to politics then I was, and there is nothing worse then talking to a group of committed young people about politics. They fall into two camps. The first are crazily liberal and wear Che Guerra t-shirts and fail to see the irony. They really do believe that their vote matters and that the Government will solve every problem. The second are Pro-war neocons, which is an even sadder situation because they sprout bullshit about fighting them abroad so they don’t get us here, and talk about the “surge working”. Really, the surge is working? Well it looks like you are in your early twenties, and if it’s working so much why aren’t you fucking fighting? I’m convinced that being a young Republican makes about as much sense as claiming you are a virgin because you only have anal sex.
All of this down time did give me an incredible opportunity to figure out really important things about myself. Like what song I would want playing if my life really was a sports movie and we it was time for the montage. This is a nasty little habit I have. When I find myself really bored, I daydream possible scenarios that will never happen to me and I try to figure out the music behind them. For example, if for some odd reason I die in a blaze of slow motion gunfire I want Street Spirit by Radiohead playing. No question. For the scene when I wake up groggy, but strangely upbeat and need to shave, I want Tied to the 90s by Travis. For the climactic scene where I slow-dance with the girl who I previously blew it with and she gives me a second chance- Hold Me Down by Under the Influence of Giants. All of these have taken me an inordinate amount of time, which is why I needed to figure out the sports montage part. I broke it down into two situations. If the scene was at the beginning of the movie and it was just me and a few token friends it would be Dirty Harry by Gorrillaz. If it was the climactic end I’d go Lightning Crashes by Live. Yes, you can say I had a lot of time on my hands.
The first few weeks were uneventful, highlighted by the fact that one of the fellow interns, a Political Science student from Duke, told me that he’s a lot like Josh Lyman from the West Wing, in that he is intelligent, ruthless, and has problems with girls but yet gets his fair share. I should have told him that I’m a lot Will Smith in that I hail from west Philadelphia, and once took down an Alien warship by using a virus written on a Macintosh computer. Sadly, I think I would have been more accurate in describing myself. The kid was the epitome of awful and easily fit into the Che Guerra toting crowd. Every thing he said somehow turned into some self righteous debate about morality. He was actually proud of the fact that he sabotaged some kids academic career down at Duke during a ‘heated’ Freshman class President election where he was a campaign manager. I was unaware that promising more soda machines in the cafeteria necessitated the need for a campaign manager.
The girls weren’t much better; instead of an intense insecurity brought on by years of lying to themselves about being intelligent, ruthless and getting women, they developed an intense desperation that only isolation could bring out. Living an hour from civilization surrounded by a group of guys who developed an intense erection when their cousin told them they, “looked good in those jeans” somehow made them notice their vaginas slowly growing dustier. Normally this situation would be awesome. Look, I would never call myself the Michael Jordan of getting girls, but I am at least a Jalen Rose type- A solid career highlighted by a few big games. But the problem was that when the girls who got there gazed into the mirror, it was quite simply not an attractive person that reflected back. This left me in an odd situation. I could take the easy win, and compromise the remote shot that a hot girl would come later in the summer. Or I could hold out right now and if the opportunity never arose, rinse and repeat this question in a month or so. Being a follower of sustained economic development I chose the latter, and quite honestly I’m happy with the results. (Side note—This choice led one of the girls, Jessie, to spread rumors that I batted for the other team. Her reasoning was stellar. That I rejected her and drank Diet Pepsi, but I later found out her clit was pierced which made me instantly regreted that choice)
Eventually the summer chugged a long a new people came, new people that unlike the others could actually have conversations with the opposite sex, this instantly gave me a boner. The first guy was from the south and named Rob. Simply put he is the greatest drinker I’ve ever met and coincidently one of the most outrageous. My favorite part about him was that when my parents visited he pretended to be a southern gentleman. It was awesome. The same guy who set the record for vomiting 13 times at work later in the summer introduced himself to my parents with his full name and place of birth. My only regret is that he regularly didn’t wear a white suit all the time and talk about the “colored” problem. His only downside was that he was just shy of his 20th birthday and lacked a fake id.
The next was a frat guy from Arizona named Neil who among other things could grow an awesome moustache and had a sweet laughed that was latter dubbed the “___ chuckle”. Neil and I bonded instantly. I think mainly because unlike most of the interns neither of us had any political ambition at all and both simply wanted to coast through life. Amy was last. Describe Amy Last time I checked I love girls with those three qualities.
To really understand the full effect what happened next, I need to fast-forward eight months. In eight months I will be arriving home from Europe and moving back to my college town of La Crosse, Wisconsin. La Crosse is the type of town that doesn’t where it is located geographically. The calendars in this part of Wisconsin seem to be permanently stuck in December of 1984. Reagan is still President and global warming refers to when the thermostat creeps above 32 degrees. Guys are content to work at the mill for the next 25 years, while women are content to let them. It’s like no one seems to be moving forward, but everyone seems to be getting older. Somewhere set in this pit of stagnation lies a college town where all the students seem to be in disagreement of the type of school they go to. It’s a city of 50,000 that has numerous gay bars, but a gigantic evangelical movement. A city that headquarters a high tech health care company, but still believes that jobs with blue collars are the answer. It’s a city that isn’t quite sure who it is, which makes sense, because at this point in my life neither was I. I’m not sure that I know who I am now, but I’m getting there, in a large part because of the reason for this digression, Jenny.
I had talked to Jenny before I ever met her, which because of my first message to her probably made meeting her more awkward then it needed to be. About thirty days before I returned from Europe I realized that I live in Wisconsin and sleeping in a tent during winter wasn’t a viable solution to my housing problem. I needed to find a place to live and so I panicked. This panic brought me in touch with a girl named Ashley who rented me her room for the semester. The room was shared in a house with four other girls a point that made this decision incredibly easy. In my mind I immediately thought of the erotic encounters that could potentially happen. Little did I know the logistically nightmare that could accompany it (Whose bed do we sleep in? If its her bed, how long do I stay? Do I call or walk down the stairs the next day?) As far as actually meeting my new roommates Jenny took the lead and started sending me emails, partly I think because my facebook picture was incredibly hot, but mostly to find out if I was contemptible. The emails on her side tended to be exploratory in nature, mine tended to be incomprehensible. This was due to the fact that our Internet in Rome only worked from Midnight to Six AM and most of the emails I sent were written under the influence of some kind of substance.
From: Jenny
To: Eric Gardner
Subject: Move in
Just wanted to see when you were planning on moving in. I’ll be here from January 3rd till school. Let me know, I’m done with practice at two.
From: Eric
To: Jenny
Subject: Re:Move in
I’m not entirely sure, as of right now I don’t have any money and subsist on nothing but pasta and salt. Did you know that people used to fight wars for salt? Doesn’t that boggle your mind? I’m not sure when I’ll move up. I come back on the 3rd, which I guess is dependent on whether or not I make my flight, which considering my ability to me on time isn’t for certain. Plus, I’ll have to drive to La Crosse, except I haven’t driven a car in five months so I will probably crash it into a Starbucks on the way up impaling every philosophy major in the process.
You get the point
I’m not sure what she expected when I walked through the door, but I know that what I saw was exactly what I expected. I saw the type of girl that I instantly knew was out of my league. She had this weird independence about her and a right dimple that made me want to kiss her every time she smiled. Seven months from now she would tell me she loved me. Seven months and one second from now I would tell her that I loved her. Seven months and ten minutes from now would be the last time I ever saw her and it was not because of things I did do, but rather didn’t. Strangely enough I should have seen this coming from events that happened the first night I drank with Rob, Neil and Amy.
“Wait, I think we can save three dollars if we get Busch Light instead of Keystone Light”
“A case is 11.99, we only have $40.00, and we need three. Will we be able to afford it?”
“Ya’ll, there isn’t any sales tax in Montana.” says my new southern amigo Rob.
Leave it to the kid from the south, where no one actually goes to school to figure that out. I’m beginning to think that not investing in infrastructure for the last twenty five years has actually helped the south. We grab three cases of Busch Light and bring it the counter lady. Surprisingly she is remotely attractive. Her hair is in dire need of one of those shampoos that cause orgasms you always see in TV commercials, but other then that, all things considered she doesn’t look so bad. Until I see her blues eyes. They aren’t the color of the ocean or the sky during an afternoon in Montana. Instead they were the kind of blue only found in eyes that had a child at 16 and became an abortion rights activist at 17. After some brief pleasantries I walk out, $35.97 poorer, but with enough beer to get fifteen college lightweights drunk.
Driving through Western Montana is a weird experience. The mountains always look like they are fifteen paces away, and never seem to get any closer. I think this is a naturally occurring phenomenon; I have no proof for this other then my own observations and I am probably wrong, but this isn’t the first time my unscientific mind saw this. I briefly spent some time in Alberta, Calgary, or Calgary, Alberta if you actually want to say it correctly. Each time I glanced up from a GRE book that I wasn’t reading, it looked like if I held my dick out the window I could cover the peaks with urine. It was intense. Just a quick note, the drive to Calgary is dreadful, there is nothing to look at besides mountains that are forty miles away and a bunch of cattle that are days about from having nails hit the middle of their foreheads. Which makes me wonder: Why did anyone settle in Alberta? It isn’t close to anything. And as far as I know would have unbearable winters. Don’t get me wrong, the city is wonderful. Nice people, clean; basically the opposite of any major US city. But back when polio killed half the first grade class I can’t possibly imagine why any one would want to live in a place where you had to wear snow boots year roud. I’m thinking that it was just a failed social experiment like something out of LOST. Either that or there was tons of oil.
Outside of the abundant radio stations, there really is no reason why driving through Calgary is better then driving through South Western Montana. Maybe it felt that way because I was driving to Calgary for no reason, other then to go to get away from South Western Montana. But right now I was driving through Montana with a purpose, to bring ninety beers to a group of people who spend college actively avoiding alcohol.
Alcohol however was still banned on campus, but like any aspiring lawyers or politicians would do, we found a loophole. It turned out we were able to drink off campus, two miles down the road in an old mining clearing tucked into the mountain side. None of this ever made any sense to me. Instead of allowing under age kids to drink at the campus the organization knowingly allowed them to drive two miles down a dirt road and drink there. I guess that’s the American way, pretend it doesn’t happen and once someone runs into a moose feign ignorance and moral outrage.
As Rob’s Subaru made the final turn into the clearing I realized that with the exception of Rob I had nothing in common with any of these people. I had no political ambitions, no desire to volunteer to save the world and thus nothing to really talk about. Luckily Busch Light is a phenomenal listener and I was in the mood to talk. Instantly my brain wandered to a theory I’d had for the previous seven years that could finally be put to a test, the only thing I needed was one of the new interns help.
I don’t remember the name of the first girl I hooked up with. All I remember is that she was from a town over, reasonable looking, had big boobs, and was black. I don’t mention her being black as a way to seem multicultural or anything, although I suppose you can claim the opposite since I make it a point to point it out, I just find it odd that at this point in my life I had seen maybe five black people and one of them I happened to have fingered. Hopefully this doesn’t make me seem racist or anything, but it’s the truth. Suburbia is the opposite of diverse. It happened in middle school, even though I’m not sure how. One minute I was hanging out at my friends, the next I was fingering the new girl under a blanket. Before I continue on, did I mention that her pussy smelled like a box full of shit fucked by a hobo? Because it did, really. At the moment when I initially smelled my hand I briefly contemplated turning gay because there was no way I could deal with this smell every time. I remember having my best friend Scott take a wiff a hour after, and the stench nearly made him pledge celibacy. Being that I grew up and went to school in Suburban Wisconsin, where the only black people are on TV or play for the Packers I didn’t have any opportunities to change this perception. Now I finally had a chance to expand on this theory. Does black pussy smell worse then white? All I needed was the new intern who coincidently enough just walked out of a car.
