-{ redgeek.net }-

Ten years ago, 1995: First year of college, UCSD. It was now October, just after my nineteenth birthday, and I’d spent the last four debaucherous months largely couch surfing in the polluted heart of Mission Beach.

I spent most of my time on front porches overlooking the boardwalk, steps from the sand, taco shops, and liquor stores. Since remodeled, the apartment complex was a termite-infested inhabited by waves of dubious barely-pay-by-the-month characters. The ones I knew best were in 1B: Lenny, Eric, and Hollywood. Their apartment was eternally open for anyone to come and go, although there were usually more people coming than going. It was saddled between Jamaica and Isthmus courts and central to the decadent vices of Mission, and there were more bodily fluids on that section of boardwalk than sea-water. Such was the reason the incongruous three lived there.

Lenny was a twenty-three year old ‘Guido’ from Jersey, working God knows where during odd hours to cover the cost of one room. Eric was in this late twenties, a shyster car salesman that’d regale me, without remorse, of tales of screwing poor families out of a couple thousand on a used minivan – or at least enough to rent the other room and keep a kitchen stocked with alcohol and living room with hardcore porn. Hollywood was the a-periodic couchsurfer, and butt of all derisive jokes, a towering slab of black homosexuality on loan to the armed forces.

Everyone was there to fuck women, except Hollywood, of course, who was there to fuck men.

The most important thing was to have was activity: nobody wants to hang out with a bunch of guys just drinking on their porch, even if it did have an ocean view. We pulled out everything: speakers to the porch tossing a blanket of cable-radio over the beach, dancing, interminable games of Asshole and other drinking pastimes, cardboard placards to rate passing women (only supporting the grades of ‘2’, ‘9’, and ‘10’), squirt guns, strobe lights, kegs, footballs, Frisbees, beer bongs, Jagermeister, hoses for wet T-Shit contests, day old pizza.

We each had our own ways of pulling women. Eric had the rapid-fire velvet speech of his trade, seducing girls to his bedroom before they knew they were interested. Lenny flaunted his vulgarity-laced East Coast directness to take pairs group-wise in the bathroom. Hollywood had impeccable gay-dar, and would essentially walk up to a gay man he wanted and grab the stranger’s crotch. I knew if I could cajole an unforgiving computer to draw exquisite images on screen, I sure as hell could use some combination of logic and artistry to nail a girl doggy-style on the back patio.

But I never did. Something always niggled at me. Perhaps it was my conscience, or a fear of contracting STDs during some inebriated and poorly-executed sexual escapade, perhaps both. I did however, meet M-. M- was exquisitely attractive - olive skin, a petite frame, long umber hair, with large almond eyes. We’d been out on a few dates over the summer, but the start of school had been hectic enough I hadn’t seen her in a month or so. I’d turned 180 degrees in the last few weeks, from sloven boozehound to poor, studious, dorm-living gakusei.

On this chilly Saturday night, we had plans to see her friends’ band (always a dangerous proposition, but they actually weren’t bad) out in a little joint in El Cajon. Running late as usual, I showered, threw on my last pair of clean jeans and a T-shit proclaiming some suitably obscure reference, and whisked myself out dorm suite. Anxious and behind schedule, I was taking all the shortcuts: jumping over the couch in the common area instead of walking around, combing my hair as I ran down the stairs instead of taking dawdling elevator, slipping sideways through the rapidly closing stairwell door – not fast enough. I was still trying to stop my forward momentum when I heard the denim tear.

It must have been like one of those slow-motion car crash scenes: a close-up of my face, a montage morphing from carefree and excited, and at the first resistance my eyebrows curling upside down, eyes curiously flitting toward my back, and as the first stitches pop, side of my mouth leading the rest of my lips into a downward march, eyes scrunching together in recognition and resignation, jaw tightening, skin wrinkling around the muscles and taut between them, until forward momentum is finally extinguished.

Frantically, I patted myself for the source of the sound – my back pocket, torn open, taking the seat of my pants with it exposing my at least eight square inches of boxer-briefs in all their glory. I groan, and looking back to the shred of denim still fluttering from the clasp of the door, dancing in the A/C, mocking my haste. It’s that small sheet of metal with a slight curvature at the end, the piece that guide the tumbler lock into it’s mate. Looking at it in profile, from above, it is indistinguishable from a hook – now complete with Levi bait.

Metal-door-lock-claspy-thing: 1, jeans: 0.

Clean pants: 0.

I borrow a bunch of safety pins, pour some coffee on my shirt, ruffle my hair, and call it punk. I must have looked about as punk as those Wal-mart Halloween costumes look like Barbie or Yoda.

The date went well, we smooched a little, but she never once put her hand on my bum.