| Michael Phelps |
| 2009-02-04 |
It’s fun to be famous but not fun to be famous and get your picture in the paper holding a bong. I may not be famous but I know that must be a bummer cuz your second grade teacher who called you “a little shit” or your middle school basketball coach who never played you will see it and say “I’m surprised, I always thought I would see him with a needle or crack pipe.” So it’s not all that to be Michael Phelps right now. He may have won 49 gold medals at the Olympics but now when he visits grade schools and kid’s at hospitals he’s gonna have to move real fast and pretend he doesn’t hear the parents telling their little ones to never invite his monkey to jump on their back. It’s a big change man as all of them used to push their offspring in the swimming pools at the Y hoping for at least a couple Silver and maybe a Bronze medal to show everyone in the neighborhood. All because of he just dropped by a party with a bunch of college kids. I guess it could be worse, he hasn’t been dumped by companies (Visa, Subway, Power Bar, Mazda and too many others to type) who stick millions of bucks in his Speedo’s. Yet. So that’s why I decided to sit down and think about what if something like this happened to me or even you. Have you had a butt load of fun sometime and if a picture was taken it could have gotten you in a lot of trouble? About a thousand times for me like I’m thinking back to my 18th birthday and what a couple buddies of mine from high school did to help me celebrate becoming sort of a man. First of all there is no horny cheerleader or hooker in this story. Sorry. No but this one did get twisted pretty quick after I said I had never tasted a Harvey Wallbanger before. Well before I could say I made a mistake and what I really never had before was a Pina Colada (I had forgotten I gulped down half a can of Harvey and blew chunks everywhere at homecoming the year before). Too late as my “friends” scored about 25 Harvey Wallbangers in a can (one of them cleaned out their parents wet bar) and the party was on. I don’t even know what’s in a Havey Wallbanger except alcohol but I gotta say it tastes even worse coming up than going down. It was about an hour later when most of us started puking all over our Members Only jackets that we bought together the month before at the mall. You start to think and do some strange stuff when you have vomit dripping down your new clothes. The first is you know things can’t get much worse so you take it up another level and that’s when you can get in some serious trouble, a hell lot more serious than getting your picture taken with a cheap ass bong. I think it was Jeff (who is now a judge or something in Minnesota) who said we should head over to an A & W drive nearby and try and steal every mug they had (they gave you glass not plastic in those days). Our record to that point was 8 in one night. I think after that they wise up when one car keeps ordering so much root beer and their mugs end up AWOL. Since I wasn’t driving I said ok even though I hate root beer. Once we got there we knew we had a chance to pull it off and totally clean them out cuz Marcie Givens was working that night. Now she wasn’t a friend or anything of ours but we knew she wasn’t real smart. So dumb that she actually raised her hand in US History class and asked if that president in a wheel chair (FBI) really did cut down a cherry tree. I knew this was as good a shot as we were gonna get to leave with a car full of root beer mugs so we started ordering two apiece every 3 minutes or so and she kept bringing them to the car. I mean Marcie did start to look at us like we were freaks or something cuz I think the human limit for root beer is supposed to be around 5 large mugs in an hour and we had already had maybe 75 between us. After a while there wasn’t any room in Steve’s Camaro for them but we kept on asking for more cuz I thought we might be able to start tying them on the roof but no one had a rope so we called it a night at 104. How many more mugs did they have? I don’t know for sure but there couldn’t have been many. I’m thinking it must have been tough for the manager to call the company big wigs the next day and ask for 104 new mugs cuz you know it probably looked like an inside job. I never heard if anyone got canned but I know I still do hate A & W root beer. On the way home someone thought it would be cool to knock on the door of our principal Mr. Hampton and run cuz we only had 20 something days left of high school. Besides running we thought it would be funny to leave something on his porch and no it was not dog doo doo. That one was played out even back then. No, we thought it would better to leave something that would be more permanent so we filled up this huge balloon with white paint and stuck it in a bag that we set on fire with lighter fluid. When his wife answered the door (he wasn’t even home) she did what any person would do if they found something burning on their porch, step on it hard. So how did we know that Mrs. Hampton had an allergy to latex? So the next day at school we hear that the principals wife got this really bad rash and had to go the emergency room cuz of some dickhead’s bad joke. It was a bitch cuz they grilled all of the seniors and I heard my buddy Jeff the judge almost ratted us all out. I guess he must have figured out at the last second that he could kiss any job outside of fast food bye-bye if he spilled the beans. So yeah, we got away with it but even right now I never mess around with paint. Don’t even know what latex is but I don’t want red crap all over my hands. What I’m trying to say here is I know what would have happened if someone, anyone took pictures of us the night of my 18th birthday. It wouldn’t have been pretty, not that we would have lost millions of dollars but at least a couple of us that night had a chance to be somebody. Me? Well, I've already told you before that I had to get one of those GED's and no this didn't have anything to do with it, failing 4 out 5 classes my last semester did the job. But if I wasn't such a tool it could have messed even me up. Since right now it seems just about anything you do could end up on You Tube it is flipping scary out there. Maybe the next time you pull out your camera to snap something you might want to think about what else is in the picture that might fuck up someone’s life? Big Brother kinda got here a long time ago but who wants to be a part of that team? Not me. How about you? Later. |
If you email Spike, he'll read it.
Copyright 2006 Spud Goodman Productions