“Come on, GeekMan! Let’s burn rubber!”

“Yeah! Let’s peel out!”

“Go GeekMan, go!”

“Just like Pole Position, man! ‘Prepare to qualify!’”

I was 20 years old and my friends and I were waiting for my teeny-tiny, four-speed, Dodge Omni to warm up as we sat in the parking lot of the mall after seeing some action-packed, thrill ride of a movie. Caught up in the excitement of the moment, and possessing far less than my fair share of college brain cells, I decided that I would grant my friends’ request because peeling out of the lot would be lots of fun. Besides, my friends wanted to do something crazy and wasn’t I the coolest and craziest sumbitch on the planet?

Damn straight I was.

I looked in front of my car and saw nothing but an empty lot as far as the eye could see. I checked out the rear view mirror and was surprised to see no one there either. I guess going to the late, late show at the theater was good for something after all.

I revved the engine like a stock car racer and gave my friends an evil grin.

It was at that moment that a little light bulb of ingenuity stupidity went off in my head. If peeling out while going forward was thrilling and exciting, I thought to myself, then wouldn’t going in reverse be an even bigger thrill? My friends would never expect me to do that so my ‘crazy-cool’ quotient would go up another notch, making me super ‘crazy-cool’ and thereby irresistible to women. A quick daydream involving myself, the redheaded beauty down the hall and the blonde twins in my theater class followed.

I had a vivid, if slightly unrealistic, imagination.

Throwing caution and common sense to the wind, I threw the car into reverse and stomped on the gas. Rubber melted, my friends screamed in delight and we took off at over 50mph

Backwards.

Let me take a moment now to reiterate that I didn’t see anyone else anywhere in the lot. As far as I could tell, the place was empty and I really did check my rearview mirror.

Twice.

However, I must have had a blind spot because I somehow didn’t notice the huge 4-door, 1984 Cutlass Supreme parked two rows behind me. I also didn’t notice the two high school teenagers, obviously on their first date, making out inside.

I hit them midway between the front and rear doors on the passenger side. Hard.

When the police arrived on the scene half an hour later, they were amazed to find the Oldsmobile nearly folded in half and completely unsalvageable and my tiny, pathetic Dodge Omni with nothing more than a slightly scuffed paintjob. That’s right, my car kicked their car’s ass. Amazingly, no one was hurt, no one was arrested and miraculously, the kids’ fathers never pressed charges against me.

I wonder if those kids ever had a second date?

Anywaste, all I got was a $200 ticket for reckless driving and a stern warning from the officers to watch out when backing up in the future. I told them how sorry I was and then tried to make light of the situation by asking them to put me out of my misery and shoot me.

The officers were not amused.

Quickly thanking them and beating a hasty retreat, my friends and I got into my Omni-potent Dodge and began the drive back to campus, slowly and safely. Because we were hungry after our exciting ordeal, we couldn’t resist stopping at a nearby Denny’s for a Grand Slam to talk about our exciting evening. It was there at Denny’s that my evening morphed from a simple bad day into a truly legendary night of torturous horror.

I got locked out of the car.

But that’s not all. Oh no, that would be too easy, wouldn’t it? You see, not only did I accidentally lock the car keys inside the car, but the same officers from my earlier accident showed up to help me get back inside. I was forced to endure 40 minutes of alcohol and drug testing right there in the parking lot of Denny’s, all the while explaining that I was just a stupid moron and not high or drunk. After they got the door open I didn’t ask them to shoot me, because I was afraid that this time they really would.

In fact, I’m sure they would have.

After that night, my friends no longer considered me ‘crazy-cool’; they just considered me a ‘psychotic-lunatic’. And after this story made the campus rounds, the twins would huddle together and whisper anytime that I dared to approach. And I never even found out the name of the cute redhead down the hall.

I really miss that car.

When I was about 8 years old, I had an electronic toy similar to a Casio keyboard that made ‘computer’ noises when you pressed certain buttons. One day, my cousin and I were bored and decided to entertain ourselves by building a machine that would answer any question anyone could ask of it. Never mind that we didn’t have any tools and the only computer we’d ever seen was on TV and always shouting “Danger, Will Robinson!” We figured all we’d need was a few crayons, some paper, my toy and a big cardboard box.

Fortunately, my mother had just gotten a new TV.

We cut a hole in the top of the box just big enough for a piece of paper, put the paper and crayons inside the box and wrote The Answerizer on the outside. I took my computer noise making toy and sat inside the box ready to write the answer to any question on the paper and push it through the slot. We figured that since it would sound like a computer everyone would think it was a computer. Especially since no one would be able to see me inside. Now, all we needed was someone to test our machine on.

My cousin went to the kitchen to get my mother.

When my mother saw this cardboard box in the middle of the living room with the word Answerizer written on it in big, bold, red Crayola letters and computer noises coming out of it, I can’t believe she didn’t fall to the floor and break down with laughter. Instead, she played along and asked a question.

“Are my kids going to drive me crazy?”

A few moments later, her answer came out.

“No, you already are.”

She did not like this answer and to show her displeasure, she kicked the box. To be fair, she didn’t kick hard at all and she couldn’t have known that I was leaning up against the side of the box trying to listen to what was going on. Satisfied that she had exacted her revenge, she turned to go back to the kitchen. However, before she could leave, another piece of paper came out of the Answerizer.

“See? You are crazy.”

We were ordered to dismantle the Answerizer immediately. We never built another one.

If you missed the first two parts of this series, they are here and here.

In the morning, I awoke to the wonderful smells of my uncle Kermit’s Famous Perfectly Round Silver Dollar Pancakes being made in the kitchen. No one else in the house appeared to be awake yet so an idea formed in my head. Since I was a young man with an unhealthy addiction to Dungeons & Dragons, I thought I could begin my training as a master thief (elfish, of course) by sneaking into the kitchen and stealing a delicious pancake without my uncle ever knowing. I decided that this was the perfect opportunity for me to work on my Hiding in Shadows and Move Silently skills. Both were at a meager 30%.

Hopefully, I wouldn’t get caught and need to make a Saving Throw vs. Punishment. I always failed those.

Ninja-like, I crept from the living room sofa bed where my cousins, brother and I were sleeping. By slowly sliding off the bed instead of bouncing off, I avoided waking them or making any squeaking noises that would give away my position to my uncle. My uncle, blissfully unaware of the silent death in Aquaman Underoos sneaking up on him, continued with his pancake ministrations.

I smiled in anticipation of fluffy, pancakey goodness.

Making my way slowly to the kitchen, I stalked my pray as the wolves on the open plains. I moved like a cloud on a windless night, making no sound save my own beating heart. I approached the kitchen door like a wraith, he would never even know I was there. Look at that fool, happily making pancakes. Perhaps I should backstab him with my aqua-slipper while I’m at it. He won’t even suspect…

“Good morning GeekMan! While you’re up why don’t you set the table?”

What?!? He must be a 10th level wizard to detect my stealthy approach. No mortal man could possibly have heard me. Am I not GeekMan, Master Thief of Upper Elronadom? How was this possible?

“Sure, Uncle Kermit. No problem.”

I’ll get you, uncle. Oh, yes. And you shall rue the day you defied me. Do you hear me? Rue! BwahahahaHAHAHAhahaha!

I began setting the table.

A little later my Aunt Miss Piggy joined my Uncle in the kitchen. After a few moments, I heard something that sounded a lot like laughter. Listening a little harder as I set the table in the dining room, I thought I heard my uncle say, “Well, how was I to know? They look the same and what in the world would anyone use that for, anyway?”

My Aunt just laughed harder.

I didn’t know it at the time, but my Uncle had made a mistake that was going to come back and haunt everyone in the house. Especially him and his reputation as the families master chef. A half-hour later, everyone was awake and sitting at the table eagerly awaiting some Christmas morning pancakes. My aunt and uncle brought out the plates piled high with sausage, bacon, eggs, potatoes and pancakes and we attacked the food like Amazonian red army ants on a dead monkey’s corpse.

In my family it’s serve yourself, and quickly, or go hungry.

Usually, when we eat my uncle’s pancakes, we all ooh and ah in admiration of his culinary skills. But this time, as I bit into a pancake, I noticed something peculiar. It didn’t taste the way I remembered it tasting. In fact, it didn’t taste much like a pancake at all. Looking around the table, I saw a look of consternation on almost everyone’s face. We were all still chewing, but no one was swallowing. Looking across the table at my Aunt Miss Piggy, I noticed that she hadn’t touched her pancakes and was just sitting there watching all of us with an almost constipated look on her face. Uncle Kermit’s face turned beet-red as he saw us, one by one stop eating and look at him.

“It’s really not my fault.” He said. “What the hell is Aunt SuLu doing with a whole bottle of Orange Extract in her cabinet?”

My Aunt Miss Piggy laughed so hard that she accidentally knocked over her plate of food onto the floor.

It seems my uncle forgot to read the labels and poured a half bottle of orange extract into the pancake mix instead of vanilla extract. Let me tell you, orange extract and pancakes don’t mix well at all. In fact, mixing orange extract with milk in pancake batter is so god-awful that I think it was used as a method of torture in the Middle Ages. At the very least it’s on par with mixing OJ and toothpaste. My uncle has never lived that one episode down and every time he’s gone into the kitchen since, someone will almost always warn him to read the labels.

He really hates that.

Thank you for taking the time to read about one of my favorite Christmas memories. In the years to come, may your memories be as heartwarming and vibrant to you as this memory has been, and still is, for me.

Here’s to happy memories for everyone. Cheers.

The first part of this story can be found here.

After the monopoly incident we decided that we wouldn’t play any more board games. Instead, we got ready for dinner and sat down at the table to eat. After dinner we had a few hours to kill before midnight so we decided to watch a movie.

Then it was time to open presents.

We’re a very giving family, so everyone had lots and lots of presents both to give out and receive. We had a lot of fun ripping open presents and throwing the wrapping paper all over the living room. Sometimes I think my family loves unwrapping the presents almost as much as the actual presents themselves.

One thing I know for sure is that we love practical jokes.

Now keep in mind that I was about sixteen years old and like anyone that age with a drivers license, the only thing I wanted for Christmas was a car. Due to my many slick, suave and subtle teenage hints earlier in the year, my entire family was fully aware of my desire for a personal form of locomotion.

Especially my favorite aunt, Aunt SuLu.

After all of the presents had been given out and opened, and I had made it known to everyone just how disappointed I was that there was no car for me under the tree, my aunt SuLu handed me an envelope. By the way she looked at me when she handed me the envelope I knew this was something special. I ripped into that envelope like a starving hyena into a week-old buffalo carcass. Inside was a single white piece of paper with the words, “look in the garage” written on it in big, bold, black letters.

My heart skipped a beat and my mouth dropped open.

I screamed like a little girl invited to her first sleepover, dropped the card and took off like a shot for the garage. When I got to the garage I opened the door and ran inside fully expecting to see a brand new car waiting for me. Instead, the garage was bare to the walls with no new car in sight.

But there was something on the floor in the middle of the garage.

With my family standing in the doorway trying in vain to hold back their laughter, I walked over to the item in the middle of the floor. What I found was a nightmare. Resting on top of another white card was a teeny, tiny and very ugly matchbox car. Picking up the car I was able to read what was inscribed on the card.

Gotcha.

For a moment I couldn’t believe it. It just seemed so improbable that my favorite aunt would do something so horrible to me. I mean, wasn’t I her favorite nephew? Weren’t she and I always the ones who played practical jokes on everyone else in the family? Why would she betray me like this?

Then I smiled.

The beauty of this amazing practical joke hit me like a baseball bat to the brain. It was sheer genius. It was simple, practical and funny as hell. I had newfound respect for my aunt SuLu and I knew that she and the rest of my family were waiting for me to give them a reaction worthy of such a great joke. So, with my face red from embarrassment and shame, I looked over to my family and gave them what they wanted.

“Damn,” I said, “that was good.”

Then everyone laughed and made fun of me for the next few hours until we went to sleep. To this day everyone in my family still talks about my special ‘Christmas car’. My mother especially enjoys telling this story because more often than not, she was the butt of my aunt SuLu and my jokes. She’s very happy that I got my comeuppance and that she was there to witness it.

I’m just happy I didn’t break down and cry in the garage.

Now, although my family never did buy me a car when I was a teenager, a few years ago I bought one for my mother. A nice, brand new Infinity QX4. She loves her car very much and I’m really glad I bought it for her, since she’s a wonderful mother and deserves nothing but the best. However, nowadays when she gets me upset, nothing makes me happier than telling her I’m going to take away her toy until she apologizes.

Revenge can be so sweet.

~~Next time, Breakfast.

Everyone has a favorite Christmas memory and I’m no exception. The Christmas I’m going to tell you about is one that happened long ago in my youth and has since become part of the GeekMan family legend. It’s much funnier when I tell it in person, but you’ll just have to imagine for yourselves some of my facial expressions and intonations because… well, I’m not there to tell it, am I? I’ll introduce my family members as they come along in this story, but for right now let’s just dive right in and start off right after my arrival at my aunts house in Upstate New York.

This all takes place when I am roughly 16 years old.

We arrived in the early evening, about five or so, so it wasn’t yet time for dinner. My aunt and uncle, Miss Piggy and Kermit, we’re still in the kitchen cooking, so we had a couple of hours to kill before we ate. Since everyone in my family is a geek, we had a number of games to choose from to keep ourselves occupied. We didn’t have that long before dinner, so we decided that we would play a quick game of Pictionary.

Yessir, we’re a wild bunch alright.

In my family it’s a well known fact that my mother is the absolute worst Pictionary player in history of the world. She can’t draw, is horrible at giving clues and wouldn’t know how to cheat if her life depended on it.

Sweet, loveable, and utterly hopeless at board games pretty much sums up my mom.

No one wanted to have her on their team, so we would always go out of our way to try and convince her not to play. We’d tell her she looked tired, or that she should help out in the kitchen and sometimes we would even threaten to take away her presents if she didn’t stay away from the game.

It never worked, but we kept trying anyway.

For this particular game on this Christmas Eve the teams were split up like this;

Team 1

LuSu (mother of DeeDee and Princess)

Princess (my cousin, six months older than Fishman)

Fishman (my younger brother)

Zappy (my aunt SuLu’s ‘partner’)

Team 2

SuLu (my favorite aunt)

DeeDee (my other cousin, six months older than me)

Mom (my mother)

GeekMan (me)

There were other people there, but in their infinite wisdom, they decided not to play. Mr. Volkswagen, my mother’s boyfriend at the time, had already managed to have four gin & tonic’s in the 20 minutes between our arrival and the beginning of the game, so he was passed out in the basement couch. And Miss Piggy and Kermit were still cooking so they couldn’t play either.

As an aside, it must be noted that my aunt Miss Piggy made the absolute best Spanish rice in the history of the world. In fact, it was so good that during the entire night my mother and I stole all the little green olives from the pot. My aunt knew that my mother and I loved the olives, so she would always make the rice with extra olives just for us to pick out. Of course, that didn’t really help because my mother and I would eat all of them anyway, and there wouldn’t be any olives in the rice by the time dinner rolled around.

Wow, I’m drooling right now.

Anywaste, back to the game. My aunt, cousin and I knew that we were going to lose the game, so we decided to just have fun and let the inevitable happen. During the course of the game we all did the usual shtick people do during Pictionary. We drew stick figures, dollar signs, houses and a whole bunch of other things to help get our points across to our teammates. We all tried to cheat by making grunting noises or gesturing wildly at our teammates, and even with my mother on our team we were doing pretty well. So well in fact, that we were winning the game.

Then mom stepped up to the plate, looked at her card and frowned.

Now, we all knew she couldn’t draw but we still weren’t prepared for what we saw her doing to the drawing board. I’m sure that after her turn the board felt violated. Soiled. Raped. Strange shapes, symbols and wacky patterns appeared on the white paper as if my mother were vomiting black ink like the little girl in The Exorcist. One shape that caught everyone’s attention as soon as she drew it was something that could only be described as a large symbol of male genitalia.

And it was erect.

Basically, that brought the game to an end faster than if my grandmother had suddenly popped out of a cake, stripped naked and danced a jig on the kitchen table. No one knew what to say or do, so we all just looked at the board in an uncomfortable silence. Thankfully, god took pity on us and time ran out. When we all looked at my mother for an explanation, she gestured emphatically at the phallic symbol and said, ”It’s a bird!”

We snickered.

“Well, it is!”

Some giggling.

She pointed at some circles with little squiggles in them, “That’s a happy face!”

We laughed.

“Well, how the hell would you draw ‘The Bluebird of Happiness’?”

Eggnog was spewed from mouths and noses as we collapsed in gales of laughter.

After this we decided that Pictionary was probably not the best game to play. We then decided to try our hands at Monopoly. We set up the board and began playing. After about an hour, something caught my attention.

*sniff sniff*

GeekMan: “Anyone smell that?”

Zappy: “Smell what?”

DeeDee and Princess: “OH MY GOD!”

Mom: “Wow. Ugh. Ewww.”

Aunt SuLu: “Damn! That is foul!”

FishMan: “It smells like ass.”

GeekMan: “Like wide open ass.”

Fishman: “It smells like Mr. Volkswagon after eating burritos!”

SuLu: “But he’s downstairs.”

GeekMan: “Holy crap, it’s coming up through the floorboards!”

We then spent ten minutes screaming out as many rude and disgusting fart jokes at Mr. Volkswagon’s expense as we could. It was only then that we realized that my Aunt LuSu had been unnaturally quiet.

Too quiet.

Almost as one, we stopped laughing and looked in her direction. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor and trying so hard to hold back her laughter that her face was redder than a baboons butt. She was shaking with suppressed giggles like a human-shaped Jello mold and tears were streaming down her face like tiny rivers of shame. When she realized that we knew, she opened up her mouth and managed to stutter four words.

“It juh… just puh… puh… popped out.”

Then she laughed so hard that she fell over backwards with her hands on her ankles and her legs still crossed. As her back hit the floor she let loose one of the loudest farts in the history of modern man. The smell traveled at the speed of light and hit us like an atomic bomb. Paint fell from the walls and small woodland animals outside dropped dead in their tracks. We all gagged and ran for the exits in the type of panic usually reserved for life-threatening emergencies involving sinking ships or re-runs of Alf or Punky Brewster.

I will never play board games with my family again. Ever.

~~ Next time, opening presents…

We stood together staring out over an entire city covered in a white blanket of newly fallen snow. As we stood there on the roof, six stories above the rest of humanity, I happened to look down at the snow-covered street and had a wonderfully evil idea.

“I’ll bet we could cause a great accident by hitting a car with a snowball as it passes by!”

“True.” Said my friend with all the authority a boy one year my senior could muster, “But cars are small game. A bus on the other hand would cause a much bigger crash!”

Well, the thought of a huge crash was too much for our young, hoodlum minds to pass up, so we immediately set about creating an arsenal of snowballs and iceballs with which to bombard the next bus to be so unfortunate as to pass by our building. Then, we hunkered down behind the rooftop ledge and waited for a victim to show itself.

And waited.

And waited.

And waited.

It did not occur to us until after about twenty minutes of freezing our buts off that perhaps the buses weren’t running that day do to the massive amount of snow on the street. Although you would think the lack of any traffic whatsoever would have given us a clue.

Hey, we were hoodlums not physicists.

Out of boredom more than anything else, I threw one of my snowballs off the roof at a snow-covered parked car just to hear it hit something. When it hit it made a satisfying ‘thwap’ and cleared off a small patch of snow from the roof of the car. A few moments and another snowball later, a slightly larger patch of car was visible. I looked over at my friend, who happened to be watching my progress with clinical interest, and gave him the raised-eyebrows-and-nod-of-the-head, or REANOTH* sign.

*The REANOTH sign is an almost universally understood signal for mischief among both the young and the old. Most young people use this signal to silently inform another individual about, or invite another individual to participate in, a potentially dangerous/crazy/fun idea or action. As humans age, this signal usually evolves into a silent message from one adult to another of a sexual advance. This is then usually accompanied by a slap and/or a furrowed-brow frown and headshake from the female. Most males in the general area will then respond by covering their mouths and laughing at the sorry fate of their friend’s love life. Males should always use REANOTH with caution.

My friend understood my thinking immediately and we tackled our new mission with gusto. We would free that parked car from its snow-cocoon by slamming snowball after snowball onto its hard and unyielding roof. After about 10 minutes we managed to clear almost all the snow off the car and we made an important discovery in the process. The larger the snowball, the more satisfying the sound and the more snow we could remove in one shot. This is vital people, so write it down.

Bigger snowball equals more snow removed.

Got it? Good, because we had a lot more snow and there were a lot more parked cars waiting to be liberated from their frozen-water oppressors. We decided that the next car should get the royal treatment and we went about creating a super-huge snowball. A snowball to end all snowballs, the big daddy of snowballs and when it was done we christened it ‘Mr. Clean’. Mr. Clean was maybe three feet across, two feet wide, too thick for us to wrap our arms around and packed solid with snow.

Mr. Clean was the world’s first nuclear bomb in snow form.

Somehow, don’t ask me how cause I couldn’t tell you, we managed to get that monstrosity up and onto the edge of the roof. We picked out our victim, made a few aiming adjustments and pushed Mr. Clean over the edge. For those of you who do not have degrees in physics let me paint the picture for you. Two young mischievous little hoodlums have just thrown a 35-pound snow bomb off of a six-story building onto a parked automobile’s roof.

Yeah, yeah I can see you wincing. But like I said, we were hoodlums not physicists.

Now, to be fair our plan worked like a charm. To say we cleared the roof of snow would be a massive disservice to Mr. Clean. His impact on that car had the same displacement effect as a giant meteorite slamming into the center of a small lake. Snow went flying off that car like butter off a hot skillet. It was like all those videos of nuclear blasts where you see the sound wave blow out the nearby buildings in an ever-widening circle of death. Mr. Clean performed just as his name implied he would, he cleaned all the snow off that car, but good.

There was just one teensy, tiny little problem.

Like I’ve stated before we were hoodlums not physicists, and we had failed to take into consideration the effect such a heavy object dropped from so great a height would have on the relatively flimsy material of a car roof. Not only had Mr. Clean cleared the car of snow, he had also smashed the roof down into the car’s backseat and blown out all the car windows. Glass and snow was all over the pavement just like the innards of a bug after being squished underfoot.

It looked like a giant had stepped on a big, metal roach.

My friend and I stood there for what seemed like an eternity, but could only have been one or two seconds, staring down at the damage we had done. Two seconds of utter silence, with only our heavy breathing to fill the void. Two seconds was just long enough for the beauty of seeing the snow fly off the car to be replaced by horror at the damage we had done.

Two seconds was also exactly how long it took for the car alarm to go off.

When the alarm went off, my friend and I broke out of our spell of horrified inactivity and ran like hell. By the time we got back to my apartment we were laughing like mad monkeys and re-enacting the snow-explosion with evermore exaggerated details. We promised each other that we’d go down the next day and check out our handiwork up close and personal. Perhaps with some other friends so they could confirm our dirty deed for the entire school and thereby make us famous. However, the next day the car was gone and with it our evidence. No one in the neighborhood ever mentioned it and we never found out what happened to the car, but my friend and I still laugh about the Mr. Clean incident to this day. All it takes to set us off is a car alarm on a cold winter day and we’ll look at each other and say:

“Bamph!” Pause. “Weep, weep, weep, weep, weep, weep!”

Grinning like an idiot in the chill winter air, my nose dripping like an open wound, I repeated the young man’s call of ownership and waited for the inevitable.

“I got dibs* on this one.”

* Dibs has almost religious meaning for young boys and calling dibs on something, anything, carries the weight of a Holy Decree carried down from the Mount. By calling dibs on something, a person has declared that they ‘own’ it. This is not to say that they actually own anything at all, but rather that everyone else must acknowledge that the dibs caller has specific rights to the item in question. Should someone else then try to acquire said object before the dibs caller, or before the dibs caller relinquishes his rights, then something unnamed and undefined yet suitably horrible would happen. Something like having to eat a booger picked fresh from the dibs caller’s nose or having to suffer the “Gas Chamber”. The Gas Chamber meant being sat upon, and farted on, by the biggest, fattest boy in the group. Hey, kids can be cruel.

I was a predator lying in wait for my next victim. I was a silent, invisible specter of doom in my bright orange jacket with brown, fake-fur lining around the hood. My blue, white and green mitten covered hands almost shaking in anticipation. The sheer thrill of the hunt filling me with more energy than any Kool-Aid and Pixie-Styx concoction ever could. Practically vibrating in place from excitement, I watched as my quarry came closer, seemingly unaware of the danger ahead.

I was holding The Most Perfect Snowball Ever™ and waiting for a bus.

Every kid growing up in the city knows about the almost symbiotic relationship between snow, kids and city buses. When snow falls in the city it’s the responsibility of the children to make like Thor and rain down fist-sized balls of powdery death upon every city bus that dares to enter their turf. And it is the duty, nay the honor, of the city-employed bus drivers to keep driving as if being pelted with thousands of soft, white, puffy meteorites were a normal part of their every day. It should be a badge of honor to them, something to brag about at the water cooler every evening.

“Hey Joe, I got hit about a thousand times on Avenue D and Flatbush. I bet there were oh… twenty, twenty-five kids out there today.”

“Ah Dan, that’s nothin’. Those kids near Ocean Ave and Kings Highway must have gotten a new leader or something cause they’re making plans. Can you believe they set up an ambush for me today?”

“No! They didn’t!”

“Yep, sure did. There musta been about a hundred kids and they all aimed for the front windshield.”

“Man, you are so lucky.”

“Don’t I know it.”

On this particular day I was with about seven or so other kids. We’d been throwing snowballs for the better part of an hour at our favorite spot, where you could see the bus coming from twenty blocks away. That left plenty of time to make snowballs and get into position before the bus got within striking distance. Everything was fine until I spotted something different about this bus, something out of place. Something so amazing, so astounding that it set my heart aflutter and my mind reeling.

The bus driver’s window was open!

I stood there for what felt like forever, staring in awe at what must have been every city boy’s winter wet dream. The perfect target for the perfect snowball. I distinctly remember thinking that whoever was driving must be new, or perhaps just stupid beyond all comprehension. An open window on a city bus when there was snow to be found?

Inconceivable!

Quickly, I set about creating The Most Perfect Snowball Ever™ and informing my compatriots that I had dibs on the next bus. This was key, because if I hadn’t called dibs, someone else might have seen the open window and called dibs first. That would have sucked and would probably have lead me down a different path on the road of life. One filled with trailer parks, lawn chairs, six-packs of cheap beer and a broken-down, gas-guzzling Ford.

Yeah, I would probably have wound up in Jersey.

I waited patiently for the bus to get close enough for the other people in the group to notice why this particular bus was so important, so special that it required a ‘Dibs Call’. It only took a few moments before they saw it too, and then everyone was in awe of my amazing luck. They all congratulated me on my find and acknowledged my right to go for the window first. Even the bigger, older kids could only look on in rabid fascination as the bus drew nearer, its open window beckoning like the high score on a Pac-Man machine, for someone brave enough to find a way to knock it down. At that moment I was like a tiny winter god to them, lording over my kingdom as I waited to pronounce a death sentence on a village idiot.

My nipples were hard.

The bus came and I took careful aim. Everything was riding on this throw; my reputation was on the line. If I missed the other kids would know that I had had greatness within my grasp and let it slip through my fingers. I would forever after be a snowball outcast, last picked during snowball fights and relegated to only making snowballs for others or being a living shield and ‘taking one for the team’.

Oh, the horror.

I couldn’t let that happen, I wouldn’t let that happen. I threw that snowball as hard as I could and it flew from my hand as if it were a hunk of steel with a laser guidance system and the bus driver was a giant magnet. It went right through the center of the open window and hit the driver square on the side of his head. Upon impact it exploded like a miniature nuclear explosion, white shards of ice and snow flying outward from the impact epicenter like a flower petal opening up in the morning sun. It hit so hard that I bet he spent the rest of the day picking snow and ice from the deep recesses of his ear canal.

My god, it was beautiful.

For the rest of the winter season I was ‘The Man’. All my friends wanted me on their snowball teams and even the older kids knew my name. I lived like a celebrity and loved every minute of it. I was famous and I owe it all to a nameless bus driver who committed the cardinal sin of driving a bus during the winter in the city and leaving his driver’s side window open. Thank you New York City bus driver, wherever you are, for being brave enough to do the unthinkable and bring joy to a young boy in Brooklyn.

Or, for being a truly stupid man and not realizing the danger you were in. Whatever.

My brother is a fishtank maintenance guy. What does a fishtank maintenance guy do, you ask? It is his job to go to the homes of trust fund babies and people who fit the ‘I’m so rich I can’t be bothered to even feed my fish’ description and feed their fish. He also cleans the tanks and recommends new and exotic fish to them in the hopes that they’ll buy what amounts to a $2,000 goldfish.

Henceforth, I shall call him Fishman.

Well, Fishman and his girlfriend threw a Halloween party on Saturday that rocked. To be fair, their parties are almost legendary, with lots of inventive touches like last years’ Barbie’s House of Horror. This year they had ‘artwork’ consisting of close-up photographs of roaches, a working slide that lead to a queen sized bed, two dance floors, a Dollhouse of Horror and many store-dummies in various poses of death and decay.

It was a blast!

Since it was a Halloween party, everyone went in costume. Fishman and his girlfriend went as ninja warriors. HoBiscuit went as the most adorable Strawberry Shortcake I’ve ever seen, she even carried around strawberry air-fresheners so she would smell the part. I went as Steve Irwin, complete with giant stuffed crocodile, giant snake and a host of lizards, frogs, snakes and spiders.

Yeah, I did a lot of “Crickey!” this and “Danger!” that.

We danced, laughed and generally had a blast all night. It wasn’t until after 4am when we got home and we were considered losers for leaving so early. Oh, one thing that scared me and my friends more than anyone’s costume was the open clam bar. I don’t know what my brother was thinking when he dreamed up that little gem, but having an open clam bar at a Halloween party with only one working bathroom is never a good idea.

Especially not when it clogs up. Ewwww.

When I was a young boy growing up in Brooklyn I had a dog named Samantha. We called her Sam though, because that had fewer syllables and Sam, like a young child, knew almost instinctively that hearing her full name meant she was in some sort of trouble. Whenever she heard “sa-MAN-tha!” she would look up at whoever was calling her with big, sad, brown eyes and duck her head as if to say, “I don’t know what I did, but I’m so very sorry. Please don’t be angry with me, I love you.”

Damn, she was good.

Of course, calling her Sam meant that most visitors to the house would get her gender confused and think she was a he. This would upset me to no end and I would spend the better part of an hour explaining, with all the knowledgeable, grave authority that a boy of 8 could muster, that Sam was a girl-dog, not a boy-dog and only poopy-heads would think otherwise.

If necessary, I would draw pictures.

Sam was, and to my mind still is, the best dog ever. She would sit with quiet dignity, as I would dress her in a hat, scarf and sunglasses. She would never, ever bite anyone, no matter how hard her tail was pulled or how long you blew on her face. She was smart, too. She knew that when the family was eating she wasn’t allowed in the kitchen, but she also knew that if my brother and I didn’t like the food she had a very good chance of getting some. What was a dog to do?

A true doggy conundrum.

Well, she figured out that the refrigerator was next to the kitchen entrance and that it was inevitable that someone would need something from it during the meal. When that someone got what they needed and headed back to the table she would try to tiptoe in behind that person!

I can just imagine what was going through her genius doggy-mind.

Food in kitchen.

Go inside? Not allowed. Get yelled at. Bad dog.

How get food?

Humans go to fridge-thing.

Fridge-thing near me.

Sneak in!

Humans not see. No yell. Good dog.

I genius!

If it weren’t for her nails going clickity-clack on the linoleum floor she would have made it, too. Every night it was always the same, someone would get a soda from the fridge and ‘click-clack, click-clack’ Sam would try to sneak in behind him or her. It was very funny to watch her face as she got caught in the act. Each and every time, without fail, she would stop dead in her tracks with this look of complete surprise on her face. It was as if she couldn’t quite understand how we had caught her when she was being so careful and stealthy. Sometimes she would sit down right where she was, tilt her head and stare at us for a moment as if she was going over her plan in her head to find out where she went wrong.

I don’t think she ever figured it out.

We had lots of good times, Sam and I. Long walks around the block. Games of “catch me if you can” in the apartment. Days of playing with friends in the park or the street and nights in front of the TV. She didn’t care because to her, as long as my brother or me was around, it was all good.

Except the time I tried to hog-tie her like the cowboys on TV. Sorry about that Sam.

As she got older, her health deteriorated and she found it harder and harder to move around. She would spend most of the day and night trying to sleep at the foot of the front door where I think she liked the light breeze from the gap between it and floor. Sometimes, when she was deep in the throes of a nightmare and crying in her sleep, I would get up from my bed and join her on the floor.

My mother would find me there in the morning, my arm around Sam and a Flintstones pillow under my head.

Sam passed away a very long time ago. I look back on the times we had together as some of the best times of my life. I don’t believe that Sam was better than anyone else’s pet, but I can say with absolute certainty that Sam was greatest dog I’ve ever known. I’m sure a lot of you would argue that your dog/cat/bird or other animal is or was the greatest pet anyone could ever want and how dare I compare my raggedy mutt to [insert pet name here] who’s obviously superior in every way, and you’d all be right.

You just wouldn’t be right for me.

While there have been other dogs in my life since Sam, none have ever been as… well, Samantha-ish. And none have ever measured up to the impossibly high dog-standards she set in my mind. I don’t think any dog ever will.

Here’s to you Sam, the best friend a boy could have.