This Might Get a Little Heavy

by Ralphie May

  Friday morning I grabbed his keys and headed out. The plan was to go to school, ditch school, pick up supplies, then head home to get some sleep before an early drive Saturday morning to the campground. Easy-breezy.

  On the way home from the store I was cruising down a country road I’d traveled a thousand times, listening to that old worn-out Eagles’ Greatest Hits album again with my windows down and my seat belt off, and I was struck by a weird combination of excitement about my future and what I would later recognize as nostalgia (for what, I still have no idea). It felt like one of those moments in your life where everything is in sync, like you can feel yourself going with the flow, and the flow is going in the right direction.

  It felt like that right up until the moment I was hit by a drunk driver.

  Floating down the road on autopilot, letting “Witchy Woman” lull me into a false sense of security, a car headed in the opposite direction crossed over the lane line and hit the front driver’s-side quarter panel of the Silverado at full speed. The impact pushed the truck laterally toward the shoulder of the road, then rolled it down an embankment on its longitudinal axis into a ditch between the road and a soybean field.

  According to the sheriff’s deputy who found me, the truck rolled between two to four times, landing on its side. It’s a miracle he found me at all. You couldn’t see the truck down in the ditch from the road surface until you were right on top of me, and even then you’d have to be looking because it was starting to get dark and the guy who hit me was long gone (I assume it was a guy—they never found him). Thankfully, a lady down the road heard what sounded to her like a large explosion and she called the sheriff.

  When the deputy arrived on the scene, the searching beam of his flashlight shocked me back into consciousness for about ninety seconds. All I know about the accident I learned from the police reports. I remember only two things from that brief period of lucidity: the smell of gasoline and the sound of “Witchy Woman.” Through the mayhem and carnage and twisted metal, the engine of the Silverado was still running, and the tape deck was still playing. I don’t know if that says more about the sturdiness of Chevy trucks or the indestructibility of 1970s California country rock, but to this day if I hear “Witchy Woman” playing in a grocery store or a dentist’s office, I have to leave, and it takes me a couple days to get back to normal.

  I spent the next nine days in a medically induced coma with swelling on the brain from what’s called a coup/contrecoup injury—basically a double concussion where your brain bounces off both sides of your skull like a Price Is Right Plinko chip rattling into the $0 slot.

  When I finally woke up, I learned the extent of my injuries: forty-two broken bones, sixty-four separate breaks; three broken vertebrae, two in my neck; significant breaks in the large bones of the arms and legs; and, worst of all, sixteen separate fractures in my collarbone. With no air bag or seat belt, my upper chest took the full force of the initial collision. It’s been nearly thirty years and my collarbone still isn’t right.

  The next forty-eight days in the hospital were an endless painful parade of blood draws, sponge baths, sheets changes, 5:00 a.m. doctor’s rounds, X-rays, CT scans, surgeries, and visits from friends, family, teachers, and my girlfriend. The visits petered out after the first week—the hospital was thirty miles away and people had to move forward with their lives—but the physically painful stuff continued pretty much right up until I was discharged.

  At the time of the accident, I was already a big boy. I walked around at about 240 pounds, but I was country strong too, and in the South, a nice fat cap on your brisket is nothing to be ashamed of. Big boys like me—we carried our weight around with grace and aplomb. Did you ever watch Paul Prudhomme’s cooking show? That man could slide around in a rolling chair like a prima ballerina.

  I was not so lucky. While I recuperated, I lost a fair amount of weight, but mostly from my muscles atrophying for lack of use. When I got out of the hospital, they confined me to a wheelchair with braces on my legs and splints on my wrists, which just meant more atrophy. Except now, instead of choking down a calorically controlled regimen of lukewarm hospital food or being fed intravenously from what looked like a large bag of horse cum, I could go to all my favorite places and mow down the largest, fattiest, saltiest, greasiest plates of deliciousness imaginable. This is when the big weight gain began. Adding weight while you are losing muscle is the worst possible combination. It’s like getting Eiffel Tower–ed by fatness and feebleness. You’re fucked coming and going.

  Then, just to add insult to injury, my girlfriend broke up with me, my mother and my aunt (her sister) got into a fight over my granny’s care, and they decided to move her down to Prattville, Alabama, as some fucked-up kind of conflict resolution, and then Clarksville High School administrators tried to make me repeat my sophomore year. I’d missed so many days since the accident, they said, and since I wouldn’t be getting back to regular classes until a month before school was out for the summer, it made the most sense to just stay home, recuperate fully, and run it back full speed the following September.

  How thoughtful of them.

  What I thought made the most sense was for them to fuck right off and let me finish out the year, take all the tests I missed, and let the chips fall where they may. What were they going to do? Not let me go to class? Bar the doors? Expel the fat kid in the wheelchair?

  Good luck with that one.

  * * *

  There are two types of transformative experiences in life: the ones that change the way you see the world, and the ones that change the way you travel through it. My accident was the latter. Nothing would be the same for me after getting out of that goddamn wheelchair just before the end of sophomore year. Honor roll? College? Those are both great, but life is too short and fleeting to work your ass off for a piece of paper. I was fortunate to live through my accident, and I had no intention of taking my second chance for granted. If I was going to live, I was going to live for right now.

  That is not the type of realization most people come to expect from a sixteen-year-old kid from small-town Arkansas. Yet, most sixteen-year-olds haven’t been taking care of themselves for a few years already, and even fewer have survived getting T-boned at high-speed in what, at the time, felt suspiciously like a giant dose of karmic retribution for pocketing all that Chevy truck cash during the summer.

  The people least prepared for my epiphany were the administrators of Clarksville High School. They had no idea I saw right through the crackerjack bullshit they called school. They didn’t understand that they couldn’t threaten me with grades or the fear of poor marks on my “permanent record” ruining my life. Motherfucker, I’ve been to the other side of existence, you haven’t even been to the other side of the state!

  I’d seen the world too. A year earlier I went to Australia with the Boy Scouts for the World Scout Jamboree. I hung out on Bondi Beach and saw topless ladies just chilling like it was nothing. I learned to flirt with Kiwi girls and play the didgeridoo. Some Maori dudes taught us how to do the haka. I didn’t need a diploma for any of that shit, and I don’t need your blessing to do something meaningful with my life either.

  This realization was incredibly freeing to my spirit, and it couldn’t have come at a better time as I tried to get back to some semblance of normalcy after the accident. The problem was, as a kid, inner freedom turns everything else into a prison because you lack the means to break out and follow your spirit. Nobody’s giving you a credit card or renting you a hotel room or an apartment. You’re a prisoner of the system. It only gets worse when you discover the one thing that the wardens of that prison system—principals, teachers, parents—have been trying to hide from kids for centuries: that they’re all just making this shit up as they go along. They have no fucking idea what they are doing.

  That’s the curse of intelligence, of enlightenment, of seeing the matrix for what it really is. It strips away your delusions and ignorances. It takes away all your hiding
places and forces you to confront everything—both the good and the bad.

  Clarksville, Arkansas, was not prepared to have that daisy cutter of truth dropped through the roof of its self-imposed prison. Fortunately for the residents, they’d be rid of me sooner than they expected.

  4.

  THE LEGEND OF SWEET DICK

  Sex is a lot like stand-up comedy. If you really want to do it, you can’t let fear or doubt get in your way—you have to go for it. Not in the Donald Trump pussy-grabbing way, obviously, more in the putting-yourself-out-there-and-being-vulnerable way. At first you don’t particularly care where you do it. If you can find some dirty hole on the wrong side of the tracks that will let you get up in there, you’ll be there with bells on, because in the beginning, it’s the reps—the experience—that matter most. Eventually, though, doing it for its own sake isn’t enough. You want to be good at it. You want to be able to get up in all the best spots. To do that you have to develop a thing—a niche—that helps you stand out and attract a crowd. It took me several years of open mics, hosting spots, and middling at clubs all over Texas to find my footing onstage, but I found my fuck game much earlier—on a Saturday night during my senior year, in the front seat of the Cutlass, parked behind a baseball diamond on the outskirts of town.

  I was deep into my “I don’t give a fuck” period when I nutted up to ask Allie out to dinner and a movie. I don’t remember if that was her actual name, but Allie sounds like the name of a fun, cool, beautiful girl who is up for getting down in the front of a comfy Cutty—which she was—so we’ll go with that.

  Our first stop was Mazzio’s Pizza for some delicious pie. Mazzio’s is a chain restaurant throughout the South that has that good thick-crust pizza, which helps it hold a whole mess of meat toppings. If you don’t want pizza, they also make hoagies. And if you are on a diet, they have a salad bar. For a sixteen-year-old kid with an appetite and a budget, Mazzio’s was the tits.

  My friend Kevin’s father owned the Mazzio’s in Clarksville. Besides owning a legit dinner-date triple threat, he also had the most awesome Arkansas name ever: L. Freeman Wish. Who’s giving L. Freeman Wish a hard time? You hear L. Freeman Wish is on the phone, you take that call. Let me tell you, if you’re sick of getting kicked around by fate, there are worse things you could do than make friends with people whose first names are an initial. I do believe that is one of the secrets to making an easy life for yourself. It was definitely one of the secrets to hooking up a large six-meat pie on the fly.

  After Mazzio’s, we drove thirty miles east to the Rickwood Theater over in Russellville. Thirty miles is a long way to go to see a movie, but back then the Rickwood was the only theater for two counties, so you did what you had to do to get your date in a dark room with no parents around. Besides, you don’t follow up a majestic six-meat pie with shadow puppets on the side of a barn if you’re trying to impress a gal. You procure tickets to one of Hollywood’s finest new releases in THX high-fidelity cinema-quality sound.

  It wasn’t all bad. Sixty miles round-trip gives you a lot of time to get high and get to know each other’s private parts.

  In anticipation, I stuffed a sixer of Budweiser and two four-packs of Bartles & Jaymes Mountain Berry wine coolers (for the lady) into one of those shitty grocery-store Styrofoam coolers shaped like an old McDonald’s, with the pagoda lid that never stayed on unless you flipped it upside down. I’d had this cooler for at least a year, so it was beaten all to hell, but it was perfect for the backseat. The angled sides and trapezoid lid pressed against the seat back, while the bottom stayed flush with the seat itself, which kept the cooler sitting upright the whole ride. I was going to get one of the new models with the red plastic handle (the ones that fell apart like a Whole Foods bag), but they moved to a square design, which would lean backward and slosh all over the seat once the ice melted. The new model was also a dollar more, and I needed that dollar for ice.

  These are the things you think about when you want a date to go perfect.

  I also picked up two joints from my buddy Joel Penny. Joel Penny was a Renaissance man born to the wrong era. He was whip-smart, he read books, he played the saxophone, and he had the best long hair in school. It wasn’t that bleached-blond, straight-as-hay Bret Michaels eighties hair. It was more like a Glenn Frey, let’s-spark-a-doobie-and-start-a-band-in-1971 type of hair. A cascade of wavy brown locks that flared at the ears and curled at the bottom and made all the girls jealous. Remember that famous Farrah Fawcett poster in the red swimsuit with the hairstyle that every woman tried to copy for like a decade? Well, they weren’t copying Farrah—that poster came out in 1976—they were copying Glenn Frey. And Joel Penny had the look down pat. He also had a bunch of shit weed that he rolled for you into the finest joints in all the land. Joel was a master craftsman. The joints were as long as caterpillars and as smooth, fat, and round as silkworm cocoons. They were a joy to smoke. Lord Jesus, they were works of art.

  With two Joel Penny joints in the ashtray—one to loosen up the nerves on the way down to the theater, one to loosen up the morals on the way back up—the table was now set for a great date. I mean, Mazzio’s Pizza for dinner, a small popcorn and a Coke at the theater, some alcohol and some weed for the ride? Come on now, who’s better than me? I even let Allie pick the movie. Odds were in my favor that we were going to be making out most of the time anyway, so what did I care? We probably saw Willow or some shit, I don’t remember.

  Sure enough, we made out the whole time: through the coming attractions, through the dancing snacks singing, “Let’s all go to the lobby!,” through the film, through the credits, all the way until the houselights came up. It was great. The ride home was great too. We passed the second joint back and forth. We broke into the second four-pack of wine coolers. As we pulled into Clarksville, things could not have been going better. This presented me with a decision: take Allie home or take our relationship to the next level.

  “Wanna go to Cline Park?” I asked.

  “Sure, yeah,” she said.

  Cline Park is on the northeastern edge of Clarksville, right where the big road that winds through the Ozark National Forest dumps down into town and ends. The park was a favorite of kids from my high school because it’s out of the way and has a good amount of privacy thanks to a couple of baseball diamonds ringed by long, narrow parking lots, each with a single row of parking spots. There’s more privacy in a single-row parking lot than a rectangular-grid-style lot because you really have to look around to see other cars in a single row, and they really have to look around to see you. In that configuration everyone is more apt to mind their own business unless they want their dates to think they’re perverts. This made Cline Park the perfect spot for what would become a Ralphie May specialty—some good ol’-fashioned finger blasting.

  * * *

  At some point in the final decade of the twentieth century, finger blasting got a bad rap. It became the female equivalent of the hand job. Disrespected, disregarded, considered déclassé. I don’t know exactly when or why this happened, but it was a sad day for America and a horrible way to end the millennium. Finger blasting, like hand jobs, is a cornerstone of sexual maturation for teenagers. It is to sexual experience what the five-minute opening gig is to stand-up comedy. For most of us, it’s our first hands-on experience with the parts that make the babies. It helps us figure out where everything is, what feels good, and for how long. It’s the gateway to sex. It also builds stamina that transfers directly over when sex finally happens. You think you just inherited the wrist and hand strength necessary for some good prolonged missionary (for guys) and doggy style (for women) fucking? Like it’s a gene? Hell no. That comes from a steady regimen of hand jacking and finger blasting. It’s sexual calisthenics. It’s third base. And you can’t play baseball without third base, now can you? That’s how important finger blasting was, is, and should always be.

  That doesn’t mean it was easy. Those high-waisted Guess jeans from the eighties were ever
y guy’s nemesis. You popped the button at the top thinking you were home free, then these two giant bolts of stiff fabric were held together by a zipper that wasn’t nearly long enough to make up for the extra distance you had to cover with your hand. They were denim chastity belts. You could be elbow deep in a girl’s jeans before you hit pay dirt. It’s why they called them Guess jeans. “Hey, fellas, guess where her pussy is.”

  Allie’s jeans were no exception. I practically armbarred myself getting down her pants, navigating that wild Porky’s bush, then finding my way in. Once I did, Allie was really into it. She was alternately squirming and convulsing and bucking. She looked like she was riding the world’s slowest-moving rodeo bull. I didn’t know girls could move their hips like that. I also didn’t know that when their legs closed around your hand and crushed it into a million pieces, it probably meant they were having an orgasm.

  Then Allie did something I’d never heard of a girl doing: she pulled down her pants so I could get a better angle. Petty, judgmental bitches might call her a slut for doing that, but I call her an angel of mercy. Ten more minutes and I would’ve been on the disabled list with a repetitive-stress injury. Not that it would have been such a bad thing for my reputation. Can you imagine going to school on Monday wearing an orthopedic wrist brace?

  “What’s wrong? Get in another car wreck?”

  “Nah, got the carpal tunnel this weekend.”

  “How’d that happen?”

  “Oh, you know, just a little too much finger blasting.”

  Allie and I went at it for one whole side of a mixtape. I can’t explain how into it she was. I remember thinking, Man, you’re great at this! Maybe this is your thing, your purpose. You’re the master finger blaster. That’s how you’re gonna get laid every weekend until you graduate. The word will spread around school, then around Clarksville, and the girls will just line up to get some before you blow this pop stand for bigger and better things.