Legos, Bicycles, Computers, Cars, Motorcycles, Barbed Wire and a really good Poke in the Ribs
My best friend growing up was a kid named Patrick Charles Emerson, a kid in the weirdest situation I had ever come across and to this day, I admire him for ever having been able or strong enough to withstand our childhood. Patrick, or Pogo as he was called as a kid, (God only knows why or who gave him the nickname) and I fell together by a strange bond. I was the tall, lanky, skinny kid who was to old to fit in and Pat was the pudgy kid with glasses who was to young. We both laugh about it now, but people just look at you weird when you end up at 16 years old and your best friend is only 12.
We were both single kids. I was being raised in the home of my great-aunt who was the most thoughtful and loving, albeit quick tempered and stubborn woman I have ever encountered and Patrick grew up in a large multi-story boarding house that was lorded over, and I do mean lorded over by his grand-mother, the singularly most spiteful, mean-spirited, yet amazingly sweet old lady that has ever walked the face of the earth and her counterpart, Patrick’s mother, another cut from the same mold as the previous quasi-villain but with a self serving streak so wide you could not see across it. Now I realize that I am making both of those ladies sound like the daughters of Satan himself, but be warned that neither could hope to compare with Patrick’s aunt, a seemingly endless fountain of self proclamation on her virtue and that of her equally boorish husband, all the while extending to you her vast knowledge of what your faults were, just in case you had missed them. All in all, my great-aunt was a mom to everybody she met, his grand-mother was but a marginally sweet natured thorn in our side, his mother a grumpy distraction, and his aunt only an occasional, but rather thorough pain in the ass.
At any rate, Patrick and I fell together through a semi-painless process of having mutual friends that thought it was fun to pick on him and I always felt, as the oldest of the kids in the area, to kind of look out for him and let the other kids know on no uncertain terms that I didn’t like them picking on him. I liked the kid. Sure he was a little on the chunky side and wore Coke-bottle glasses but so what? He was honest with his friendship and I was honest in my enjoyment of being around him. Pat has always been old for his years, intelligent beyond most his age, and for most of his childhood, had difficulty with kids who claimed to be his friend but quite often turned out differently.
So like most kids who don’t have a lot of friends, we both enjoyed indoor activities and Pat had the absolute ultimate kid thing that existed in the early 1980’s. No… not video games, but Legos. Boxes and boxes of Legos. I cannot begin to tell the amount of hours that we spent building and destroying different creations, traveling to distant galaxies within our minds and discussing Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and George Lucas. Pat was, and still is, an old school Sci-Fi fanatic and I was simply a Star Wars nut, but at any rate I was also something else; insanely jealous. I had, for all my years on him (a grand total of four) not one stinking Lego block to my name and that was the source of all of my envy. I however had a gift Patrick lacked. Patrick’s mind was that of an engineer, someone who could put things together in almost miraculous fashion and make them work, so long as he had a blueprint. I on the other hand could envision wondrous things completing fabulous feats of amazement but for the love of me I could not understand the complexities of their construction. Viola. The perfect team. A designer and an engineer. A pairing of minds where one would go, “This is so cool check this out this idea.” while the other could use his analytical brain to stick in his two cent’s worth, “But it won’t work like that exactly, but if we do this…” and come up with what I could never build on my own and what he could never think up on his own. But still all in all, I was horridly jealous.
I got back at him though. Patrick’s grand-mother was such a frugal old gal… no, she wasn’t frugal, lets call it what it is, she was so damn cheap that when it was time for Pat to have a bicycle, she hunted the entire town for a used one, probably spending more on the gas to drive her old Chevy Impala around looking than she saved on buying the damn thing. And damned thing it was. Single speed, old-style street frame, pale blue, painted with a spray can, ill-adjusted wheel spokes that made the wheels shake when it rolled and sporting a huge wire basket on the front, it was without a doubt the most hideous bicycle in all of creation. To this my answer was a jet black BMX bike with yellow 5-point aluminum mag wheels and all the trimmings. He never said so, but I think deep down he hated my bike, and probably hated his too. There were times I would feel superior to him because of my prized possession, then all to often the terribly bitter taste of what I was doing to my friend would take over and I would let him ride my bike, just to see his smile because he was the only neighborhood kid I ever let on it. I like to think that he got immense pleasure from getting to do what none of the other kids would have ever dared to ask for, swooping around the street, up driveways and down embankments smiling at his tormentors knowing that he alone was the single other authorized rider of the two-wheeled steed, the squire to the knight, and to my amazement, for once, the subject of their jealousy because my unwitting elevation of his position in the neighborhood hierarchy.
Now as it would happen, because of his purely analytical mind, Patrick discovered computers in the mid 1980’s and spoke endlessly of them. How they worked, why they worked, what they could do, what they were going to do, anything and everything about computers that his endless sponge of a brain could intake and process like the very machines he was enamored with. About this time frame, he started planning what he would do with one and started making friends that were doing the same. Nerdy friends I might add, think old school geeky nerds from those horrible ‘80’s films and you get the picture. Once again, I was jealous. Not that he was interested in computers and I didn’t understand them or his fascination of them, but the fact that my friend was forsaking me for the friendship of a thing called a Commodore 64, whatever the hell that was. So I set upon myself to rectify that situation and I bought a SV something or other, basically a Commodore 64 clone and his reaction was “All this time I’ve been trying to get Mom to buy me a computer and you get one!?” Needless to say I let him use it, I simply didn’t know how. I did learn a lot from him though but as luck would have it, later that year he trumped me and got a Commodore 128 for Christmas if my memory serves me correctly.
To say he grossly enjoyed being a computer freak would be the understatement of the century. I cannot begin to count the number of times I would ride from one end of town to the other, on literally the two biggest hills in the damn place only to get to set on his bed watching him play some turn-based RPG type of game for hours on end, asking what we were going to do and getting the same old, “Yeah in a minute…” response followed by more hours of game play. So not long after I turned 18 and had the cash on hand, I bought a car and raised the stakes of our friendly little chess game… again.
Now you would have though that by the time we were both steadfastly in our 20’s we would have forgotten the game, especially since we both had a car, but as fate would have it, damn the bitch, we hadn’t. I was beginning to read motorcycle magazines and admire the photos of a Kawasaki 454 LTD and I was probably as bad about the thing as Pat had been about the computer. Then one day I heard a buzzing sound whipping up and down the road and went outside only to see, you guessed it, my good friend, no my BEST friend riding a motorcycle, not just a motorcycle mind you but a Kawasaki. It seems that he had found it for sale in the local papers and he and a mutual friend were looking it over before he bought it. It was like having your best friend start dating the woman you lusted over, it sucked, it wasn‘t fair in any sense of the word. I wound up hoping that he would wreck the damn thing so we would be on an even keel again. I came to regret that wish a short time later when he actually went and purchased it from the owner.
The gentleman that owned the little Kawasaki lived on State Highway P between Desoto and Festus, Missouri, which is as crooked a little chunk of asphalt as you will ever find. Narrow, blind corners everywhere, the occasional cow in the road or jackass in your lane kind of place that makes your butt clench like a vise to keep from having a problem you haven’t had since you were a year and a half old. We traveled out in my girlfriend’s car, a well worn old barge of a Plymouth, and Pat did the deal and paid the cash amount they agreed on for the bike, strapped on his new/used helmet, fired up the Kawasaki and took off like there was no tomorrow, although probably preoccupied with how he was going to sneak the bike into his grand-mother’s/mother’s house without it being seen. As he jetted off into the afternoon heat, I slumped into the passenger seat of my girl’s car, and I remember telling her as I pulled cap down over my eyes, “If you see him in the ditch, pull over.”
I don’t think I more than had that out of my mouth when she said, “Oh shit, he’s in the ditch.”
Now I sat up thinking that was really a bad joke and was ready to chew her out when I lifted my cap from my eyes and there he was ahead of us, three quarters of the way through a double S-curve, bike still in the ditch, with his shirt and jeans shredded like he had gone ten rounds with a gasoline weed-eater, blood, dirt and grass stains from head to toe, frantically yanking at the handlebars with all of his strength in a desperate attempt to get the death-dealing machine from out of the remains of a five strand barbed wire fence and back on the road before we caught up with him, pausing in his efforts only long enough to glance over his shoulder to see if we were anywhere near catching up.
When he saw us and knew there was no way to hide it any longer, he threw up his hands in disgust and just waited for us to come to the rescue. He was a sight to behold to be sure, grass in his pockets, shredded skin from head to toe, blood everywhere and a stupid sheepish look on his face. I started chewing him out about what the hell he was trying to do fighting to get out of the ditch, why didn’t he wait for us to help him instead of taking the chance of hurting himself more than he was. His simple reply was, “I didn’t want you to see me, I thought you’d laugh.” We piled him in the car, I gave my girlfriend some cash for medical supplies and sent them off while I proceeded to ride the battle-scarred little Kawasaki back home, which come to think of it, was a pretty good chore considering the bars were about forty degrees from straight on one side with the rear brake pedal bent until it touched the frame. I got it home, we got him home, patched him up, patched the bike up and eventually we did laugh about it, and still do to this day.
Now that things were calmed down, I was beside myself, I was not only jealous, I was green with envy on this one, almost sick to your stomach kind of thing. But, like a trooper, I sucked it up and put on a happy face, and true to our friendship level of almost being brothers, I rode it from time to time, but try as I may, I could never find one for sale that I liked or wanted. I felt that I had been finally been beaten and could no longer even compete. I mean come on, Legos, bicycles and computers were one thing, but this is a motorcycle. This is the big leagues people, no more “But everybody has a pony.” thing that kids do, this is serious “competing with the Jones” stuff and I had no cards in my deck to play so I just gave in and grew up some, got married, had kids and time marched on.
Childhood friends often separate as years pass and while I’m still in Missouri, only about an hour’s drive from where we had our great childhood adventures and misadventures, Pat now lives with his family in Florida. Unlike most childhood friends I am happy to say, we can call each other and start talking like we were at each others house yesterday. I called him in 2004 to say I was being deployed overseas in Iraq with my military unit and to take care of Renee, my girlfriend who had patched him up and who was now my wife in case the worst would happen, we talked more like brothers than old friends and not long after, I packed up my bags and went off to war.
I got the motorcycle bug again while I was deployed, reading motorcycle magazines provided by the USO and found my dream machine, a 2005 Honda Shadow Spirit, which was to me the absolute epitome of what a motorcycle should look like. Long, low, V-Twin, dual pipes on one side, mag wheels, everything I ever wanted and as luck would have it, after I got home from a fifteen month separation from my family, my pretty wife shared my enjoyment of the pretty bike and we found a used 2004 Shadow Spirit, bought it and proceeded to dress it up some.
I hadn’t told my best buddy that I had bought the bike of my dreams until the day he called and we were shooting the breeze about mostly nothing when he popped off and started telling me about his new Honda. My heart sank. I was trying to think of a way to justify what we had bought, you know, something like, “Well, I didn’t want the expense of a new one until I found out if we really liked it.” when he started telling me how much stuff fit in the back. In the back?
I could almost hear the angels start singing when he told me his new Honda was a Honda Element, a kind of boxy, square, and not really attractive, but very useful SUV type of thing. I remember saying something along the lines of, “That’s cool Bro. Renee and I found us a 2004 Honda we really like.”
Pat’s voice perked up and he replied with, “Oh yeah? What is a Civic or something?”
“No. It’s an eleven hundred Shadow Spirit.”
“An eleven hundred? A motorcycle?”
“Yep.”
“Fucker.” He didn’t hang up but I could tell he wanted to.
So here we are, still playing the game. I’m forty-two and he’s thirty-eight. He’s supposed to be coming to Missouri for his High School reunion this fall. Knowing my luck it will be on a Gold Wing, a Honda Fury Chopper or a tricked out full dress Harley.
Which got me to thinking.
Wouldn’t it be better if we just forgot the game and got on with things…?
Nah. Not while I’m on top.