The story you are about to read is pretty much true, from what I remember. The names haven't really been changed because a) nobody is innocent, and b) they wouldn't care anyway. It was in 1994.
John was nimble, after a fashion. He was also incredibly awkward. We thought the awkwardness was an act for our benefit. Nobody really gave it too much thought because he was a source of comedy. He was also surprisingly non-threatening. The reason that his non-threateningness was surprising was that he was very tall, about six foot two, and he had very black skin and dreadlocks, and he always wore a long back trenchcoat in the winter. The portrait painted by this description is not congruent with his aura. His aura, while not threatening, did like to surprise you. John's aura usually dragged John along with him for the surprise.
In two steps, John covered the twelve foot distance from the back kitchen door to the living room (we called it the living room because it had the tv, but there was no other furniture in there...none of the rest of us trusted the others enough to leave furniture out in the common areas where it might get ruined by beer). As quickly and suddenly as the motion from the back door of the kitchen began, it stopped. If it were a film, it would have been no more than four frames of movement. If it were a caroon, the cartoonist wouldn't even have bothered with the animation. One instant, there was no John...and then, with a kitchen door bang, we had a six foot two trenchcoat-wearing rastaman in our midst, very non-threateningly folding his arms in mock bravado, back ramrod straight, green Converse lo-tops shoulder width apart. He faced us at an oblique angle, and before his scarf had finished swishing from his inbound flight, he was posed like a superhero. John was a man of two states: resting and flailing. Even when he was not flailing, he looked as if he was about to flail.
"Dudes."
The greeting was familiar. Our months of living together in this house had taught us well that by the tone and inflection of this particular 'Dudes' greeting, we were about to be enlisted into a scheme. How John knew that there would be people in the living room with no furniture, and how he knew how to catch us in these situations consistently, is a mystery. We could imagine, I guess, a situation where John would come bounding through the back door and through the kitchen and to the living room to find nobody there. He would probably still strike the Warden pose for the benefit of his own ego; to practice for when the rest of us actually were there, providentially waiting for his arrival, so that he could bust in on us like a comedic truant officer.
"Dudes. You got to help me with this thing, man."
"What thing?" I said. I didn't even say it trepidatiously. We all knew we were in for a scheme, we knew there really wasn't a way out of it, and we knew that it probably wouldn't make us any worse off than we were, hanging around a room with no furniture but a console tv, an ancient top-loading VCR, and a copy of the pornographic movie "The Audition," which wasn't even really pornographic unless you had a spanking fetish. We would show that film to our fraternity pledges before we decided whether or not they would be able to handle drinking with us.
"Man, you dudes just better get on your coats." That was all the information we were going to get.
Jeff and Eric looked at each other, then at me. Then, we all looked at Matt. Then, we all looked at John. He nodded. In this fashion, we decided that we would not awaken Steve, the roommate who looked like Billy Ocean and slept in the breezeway. Because Steve slept in the breezeway, we couldn't use the front door. This is why John was always busting in the back door and not the front. Jeff and Eric didn't care; they lived upstairs and had a rickety stairway to get up to their area of the house. Their area could also be reached through a trapdoor that was at the top of a very steep stairwell in the closet off the living room, but nobody really used that trapdoor. You never knew who was going to be naked upstairs. Well, you never knew who was going to be naked downstairs, either, but at least we all had the decency to be naked in our own rooms (except for Steve, who slept in the breezeway).
We got on our coats. John led us outside, into the gravel pit of a driveway, then into the freshly snowed-in street. We had just been the recipient of four inches of powder, but the sun was glaring, and the bitter cold iced over the sunglazed white blanket and made it crusty. Being college age, and dumb, we were all wearing sneakers instead of boots.
Eric and Jeff were both also tall, but they were non-threatening in other ways. Jeff wore glasses as thick as a submarine window and Eric just couldn't get a good haircut to save his life. Matt couldn't ever be considered threatening by any measuring stick unless you looked him dead in the eyes. For some reason, Matt had these icy eyes that would have looked great on film in the noir days. Me? I had a mullet. I wasn't threatening anybody.
We went down the block. It really was quite cold. We didn't even question John about the nature of this mission at this point...it was best just to let things take their course. The course in this case was not a long one, fortunately. Just cold. Our destination was a house that was only a block away from 201 S Poplar (our house). The destination house had a yard full of debris (which was common for the neighborhood we lived in), but this debris appeared to have been at some point material that was a permanent part of the house to which the debris-strewn yard was attached. John strutted proudly. Jeff pushed his ponderous glasses up his nose. I grunted.
"Look at this 'tub, man."
Here was the point of the exercise...among the ruins of the yard, among the plaster and wattle and lathing and other debris, was a real cast iron bathtub, with claw feet and everything. This was the prize of the day, this glorious basin, this magnificent bowl, this 'tub. As in: bathtub.
Eric pointed at the 'tub. "Are you nuts? You want us to carry that? That's why you made me put on a coat? I'm freezing my nuts off here! They are clanking around like a couple of cubes in a whiskey glass!"
"Yeah, me too," Jeff said. He was wearing sweatpants. He probably also was wearing underwear. Jeff was one of those guys who is deathly afraid of being caught without underwear. It makes me wonder why he was naked upstairs so much and we couldn't use the trapdoor.
"Dudes..." John held out his enormous hands and crouched like an umpire. "This is...The 'Tub, man."
Matt looked at me, I looked at Matt. We looked at Eric and Jeff. Jeff pushed his glasses up his nose.
Cast iron bathtubs are really no longer 'en vogue' amongst anyone building or remodeling homes. The reason that cast iron bathtubs are no longer 'en vogue' amongst anyone building or remodeling homes is that they are very heavy. They weigh a lot. They weigh a lot in the way that tanks and cars used to weigh a lot. Technology has improved quite a bit for cars, and so they are a great deal lighter than they used to be. The same technological advances have been applied to bathtubs, which are quite remarkedly lighter than they were in the old days. They also no longer have claws. Tanks are heavier than they used to be, at least American tanks are, but they were kind of going for a different direction with tanks than with cars. That's the military for you.
We knew that although this bathtub was never again to be used for bathing, it was no longer 'en vogue,' but nevertheless, it was going to be in our house.
We each grabbed a corner. We each grabbed a corner except for me, because there were five of us and only four corners. I grabbed somewhere in the middle. We reflected for a moment on going back to wake up Steve, but we knew that would be useless. We would have to make do with our current personnel. Steve would just be unable to partake of the 'tub because he had not helped us to procure it. This was our 'tub, to be divvied about to whomever we so pleased. Because it was John's discovery, and because he so eloquently persuaded us that this 'tub was The 'Tub, he would of course be able to keep it in his room. We would put it in the living room, but it would make the room seem overly crowded when people were over drinking beer. It probably also would clash with the wad of Christmas lights up in the chandelier that were the living room's only source of light.
John's room was the only logical place anyway. My room was too crowded, with my big desk and all of my books and my plants and my Atari 2600. I also had a rug. The rug was made of some kind of material and pattern that you would see on the floor of a movie theater lobby from the 50s or 60s. They made those patterns incredibly colorful and hideous because they would never show any stains and they would match anything that was going to be put on them. Well, not match exactly, but there were so many hideous stain resistant colors involved that you didn't need to try to make anything match. This was my strategy in choosing the rug. It worked well; the 'tub would have destroyed the delicate effect of the rug in my room.
Matt's room was out of the question, too. You had to go through the breezeway to get to Matt's room, which would mean waking up Steve. Nobody wanted to wake up Steve. Matt did have a sweet fireplace in his room, but he never lit it, because he didn't understand how the flue worked. We kicked ourselves for having Steve as a roommate. We couldn't use the front door, couldn't use the breezeway, and now we couldn't enjoy the 'tub with a sweet fireplace.
Jeff and Eric's living room upstairs would have been not so bad for the 'tub, but it was beyond our abilities, the five young, strapping men that we were, to get that damn ton of a 'tub up those rickety stairs, and it wouldn't fit through the trap door at the top of the stairs that were in the closet in the living room.
We had a basement, but nobody knew what was down there. We could have had some very quiet neighbors, for all we knew. The basement would not have been a good place for the 'tub, though, because there was no heat down there. What good is a 'tub with no heat? None, no good at all...especially when there wasn't anything else to do in the basement anyway. Nobody knew what was going on down there.
We took the tub through the cold with our bare hands through the icy glaring crunchy snow back to our gravel pit driveway and then to the kitchen door that John usually bounded through. In order to get the tub through the door, we had to remove the shopping cart from the kitchen, because the 'tub was too big to squeeze by the shopping cart, and we were going to be damned if we were going to lift the 'tub over the shopping cart after we had just carried it so reverently down the block through the snow through the gravel pit driveway and to the kitchen.
The shopping cart was stolen. Any time you are in a town with no homeless people and you see a shopping cart and it is not at a grocery store, you can safely assume that it was stolen. John stole this shopping cart. He didn't mean to steal it; he was just in deep thought eating the four pounds of grapes he had just purchased and accidentally forgot to leave the cart at the store. It was a lot of grapes to go through (four pounds of grapes is a prodigious amount), so they lasted all the way until he got the stolen shopping cart to the gravel pit. "That was a good-ass four pounds of grapes," he said, licking his fingers. He kept the cart.
We moved the cart. After the backbreaking labor of hauling the 'tub down the block through the snow in our sneakers with no gloves in the cold to our kitchen, it was simple logistics to move the cart, tilt the 'tub, move it through the living room with no furniture except the console tv, ancient VCR, and Christmas light wad ball hanging from the chandelier, past the closet with the little steep stairway and trap door, into the hallway, tilt again, and flip into John's room.
John didn't have a rug, so the decoration was easy even with the 'tub. John had a drum set. John was a drummer. I was a drummer, too, but I didn't have a drum set. John was a much better drummer than I. Thus may largely be because he had a drumset and I didn't. Also, he played drums all the time.
John would play drums sarting at 8 'o clock almost every day. Nobody really cared about this, for some reason. I still don't know to this day why we would have John playing drums every day and just not care. Our morning conversations would go like this:
*John plays 5/3 beats for several minutes*
Me: "HEY MATT DO YOU HAVE ANY MORE OF THAT MUSIC PAPER"
Matt: "WHAT?"
Me: "MUSIC PAPER!!!"
Matt: "OH YASE! HAVE SOME!"
Me: "THANKS!"
*John switches to brushwork and sizzle*
Matt: "FUCK I LEFT IT IN MY LOCKER"
Me: "Dude why are you yelling?"
I think that for a few days John was trying to figure out a way to get the drums actually inside the 'tub, or, barring that, a way to play the drums whilst being himself actually inside the 'tub and the drums would be without. It never really worked out. We didn't witness this logistics struggle visually; John would have been embarrassed if we saw him struggling vaingloriously trying to put his tubs in his 'tub. We knew that there was a grand purpose to the 'tub, but we were not the ones to discover it. The discovery of the purpose of the 'tub was the destiny of Greg.
Greg was from the sticks. Greg was gangly, towheaded, and talked real slow. Greg never smiled, but everything that came out of his mouth was hilarious. Greg's humor was dry as the desert. Greg spoke softly, but his tongue was definitely his big schtick. Greg was a tuba player. As far as I know, Greg had one outfit: Converse hitops, black jeans, a checkered flannel, and a black t-shirt with the Tasmanian Devil on it. Greg wore this ensemble every day for as long as I remember knowing him. You expected this from Greg because he was just...well...he was Greg. Greg was a lazy man. I recall a time going to Greg's apartment.
"Hey...come on in, man" you would hear from the other side of the door. Greg wouldn't get off the couch when someone knocked on the door. You could be a raving murdering lunatic and it would not have perturbed Greg. You could rush in, turn over all the furniture, set fire to the bedsheets, and smash all the windows with a baseball bat and he would just look at you and say with that twangy twang: "Hey you better settle the fuck down, man." Greg was a man of few words, but when he said them, he took his time. His words were finely crafted. He was a true redneck artisan.
You would walk in his door, and he would be on the other side of the apartment, laying on the couch, looking at the ceiling. In the kitchenette, the water would be running. You would say "Hey...do you want this water on, man?"
"I'm washing the dishes."
"The sink isn't filling up or anything; the water is just running...you want me to turn this off?"
"No, man, just leave it be...I'm using the erosion method." Greg's water at the Egyptian Arms apartment building was free of charge, and as such, he felt entitled to use all of it that he could, because the owners of the apartment building were foreigners. I don't think they ever did anything to Greg specifically or to anyone severally, and I am not even so sure that they were in fact bona fide foreigners, and if they were, from which corner of the world they did hail. As far as Greg was concerned, though, you were a foreigner if you came from farther away than St. Louis. After that, people started talking funny.
Greg came over to 201 S Poplar one night looking for John. We let him in, as we often did. Greg didn't move as fast as John did, and so he took several seconds to make it from the back door through the kitchen, and the living room with no furniture through the hall and to John's room where the new 'tub was. John was playing funk backbeats to John Coltrane Christmas music. Greg had sort of a loping gait that, although it did not move him quickly, it moved him efficiently. His legs were long, and they carried him storklike. He rounded the corner and saw the 'tub for the first time.
Greg didn't show emotion much, but his vocal cadence showed palpable excitement as he strung together a phrase that was at least three times the length of any phrase I had heard him utter before. "Hey, man...you got...you got a 'TUB, man! You got a 'TUB! You know what that 'tub is for, man? That 'tub is for WEED, man! That 'tub is for WEED and I have got to get IN that 'tub!"
I don't think that Greg knew until then that he was a prophet. He wore the mantle of prophecy well, though, for his vision was true. The 'tub was weed; weed was the 'tub. The 'tub was festooned with cushions and blankets and became a two man operation. Those of us who were 'in the know' would sit in the 'tub and get high on Carbondale's finest ditchweed.
I wasn't much of a smoker. I had tried before and never really gotten high, but I got my first enjoyable high "in the 'tub."
Greg and John were in the 'tub. Matt sometimes got in the 'tub. Jeff and Eric got in the 'tub when their girlfriends weren't around nagging them like hens.
Big Kieth Pitts got in the 'tub. Keith wasn't really big; he was sort of tall and skinny, but you wouldn't call him big for regular reasons. Maybe that's why we always did call him Big Keith Pitts. It was just something to do, I guess. Everyone had to have a name.
Agent 20 got in the tub quite a bit. We called him Agent 20 because he looked like Andrew Jackson on a $20 bill. Agent 20 tried to sleep with my girlfriend...everyone tried to sleep with my girlfriend. When we were in the 'tub...it didn't matter.
The girls never got in the 'tub, for some reason. We don't know why. It would have been totally cool...we were a bunch of band nerds; we loved women. It would have been awesome to be in the 'tub with the girls.
Whenever we would have something bad happen, a tough day at school, a quarrel with a girlfriend, whatever..."Hey man; you got to come on in the 'tub."
We would have parties at our house all the time. Marching band people love to drink beer. Cheap beer from kegs. Some of them, when they would be over at 201 S Poplar, wanted to be in the know. They asked about the 'tub. The cool ones got in the 'tub club. It became quite the thing to be asked, "Hey, man...you want to get in the 'tub?"
John was nimble, after a fashion. He was also incredibly awkward. We thought the awkwardness was an act for our benefit. Nobody really gave it too much thought because he was a source of comedy. He was also surprisingly non-threatening. The reason that his non-threateningness was surprising was that he was very tall, about six foot two, and he had very black skin and dreadlocks, and he always wore a long back trenchcoat in the winter. The portrait painted by this description is not congruent with his aura. His aura, while not threatening, did like to surprise you. John's aura usually dragged John along with him for the surprise.
In two steps, John covered the twelve foot distance from the back kitchen door to the living room (we called it the living room because it had the tv, but there was no other furniture in there...none of the rest of us trusted the others enough to leave furniture out in the common areas where it might get ruined by beer). As quickly and suddenly as the motion from the back door of the kitchen began, it stopped. If it were a film, it would have been no more than four frames of movement. If it were a caroon, the cartoonist wouldn't even have bothered with the animation. One instant, there was no John...and then, with a kitchen door bang, we had a six foot two trenchcoat-wearing rastaman in our midst, very non-threateningly folding his arms in mock bravado, back ramrod straight, green Converse lo-tops shoulder width apart. He faced us at an oblique angle, and before his scarf had finished swishing from his inbound flight, he was posed like a superhero. John was a man of two states: resting and flailing. Even when he was not flailing, he looked as if he was about to flail.
"Dudes."
The greeting was familiar. Our months of living together in this house had taught us well that by the tone and inflection of this particular 'Dudes' greeting, we were about to be enlisted into a scheme. How John knew that there would be people in the living room with no furniture, and how he knew how to catch us in these situations consistently, is a mystery. We could imagine, I guess, a situation where John would come bounding through the back door and through the kitchen and to the living room to find nobody there. He would probably still strike the Warden pose for the benefit of his own ego; to practice for when the rest of us actually were there, providentially waiting for his arrival, so that he could bust in on us like a comedic truant officer.
"Dudes. You got to help me with this thing, man."
"What thing?" I said. I didn't even say it trepidatiously. We all knew we were in for a scheme, we knew there really wasn't a way out of it, and we knew that it probably wouldn't make us any worse off than we were, hanging around a room with no furniture but a console tv, an ancient top-loading VCR, and a copy of the pornographic movie "The Audition," which wasn't even really pornographic unless you had a spanking fetish. We would show that film to our fraternity pledges before we decided whether or not they would be able to handle drinking with us.
"Man, you dudes just better get on your coats." That was all the information we were going to get.
Jeff and Eric looked at each other, then at me. Then, we all looked at Matt. Then, we all looked at John. He nodded. In this fashion, we decided that we would not awaken Steve, the roommate who looked like Billy Ocean and slept in the breezeway. Because Steve slept in the breezeway, we couldn't use the front door. This is why John was always busting in the back door and not the front. Jeff and Eric didn't care; they lived upstairs and had a rickety stairway to get up to their area of the house. Their area could also be reached through a trapdoor that was at the top of a very steep stairwell in the closet off the living room, but nobody really used that trapdoor. You never knew who was going to be naked upstairs. Well, you never knew who was going to be naked downstairs, either, but at least we all had the decency to be naked in our own rooms (except for Steve, who slept in the breezeway).
We got on our coats. John led us outside, into the gravel pit of a driveway, then into the freshly snowed-in street. We had just been the recipient of four inches of powder, but the sun was glaring, and the bitter cold iced over the sunglazed white blanket and made it crusty. Being college age, and dumb, we were all wearing sneakers instead of boots.
Eric and Jeff were both also tall, but they were non-threatening in other ways. Jeff wore glasses as thick as a submarine window and Eric just couldn't get a good haircut to save his life. Matt couldn't ever be considered threatening by any measuring stick unless you looked him dead in the eyes. For some reason, Matt had these icy eyes that would have looked great on film in the noir days. Me? I had a mullet. I wasn't threatening anybody.
We went down the block. It really was quite cold. We didn't even question John about the nature of this mission at this point...it was best just to let things take their course. The course in this case was not a long one, fortunately. Just cold. Our destination was a house that was only a block away from 201 S Poplar (our house). The destination house had a yard full of debris (which was common for the neighborhood we lived in), but this debris appeared to have been at some point material that was a permanent part of the house to which the debris-strewn yard was attached. John strutted proudly. Jeff pushed his ponderous glasses up his nose. I grunted.
"Look at this 'tub, man."
Here was the point of the exercise...among the ruins of the yard, among the plaster and wattle and lathing and other debris, was a real cast iron bathtub, with claw feet and everything. This was the prize of the day, this glorious basin, this magnificent bowl, this 'tub. As in: bathtub.
Eric pointed at the 'tub. "Are you nuts? You want us to carry that? That's why you made me put on a coat? I'm freezing my nuts off here! They are clanking around like a couple of cubes in a whiskey glass!"
"Yeah, me too," Jeff said. He was wearing sweatpants. He probably also was wearing underwear. Jeff was one of those guys who is deathly afraid of being caught without underwear. It makes me wonder why he was naked upstairs so much and we couldn't use the trapdoor.
"Dudes..." John held out his enormous hands and crouched like an umpire. "This is...The 'Tub, man."
Matt looked at me, I looked at Matt. We looked at Eric and Jeff. Jeff pushed his glasses up his nose.
Cast iron bathtubs are really no longer 'en vogue' amongst anyone building or remodeling homes. The reason that cast iron bathtubs are no longer 'en vogue' amongst anyone building or remodeling homes is that they are very heavy. They weigh a lot. They weigh a lot in the way that tanks and cars used to weigh a lot. Technology has improved quite a bit for cars, and so they are a great deal lighter than they used to be. The same technological advances have been applied to bathtubs, which are quite remarkedly lighter than they were in the old days. They also no longer have claws. Tanks are heavier than they used to be, at least American tanks are, but they were kind of going for a different direction with tanks than with cars. That's the military for you.
We knew that although this bathtub was never again to be used for bathing, it was no longer 'en vogue,' but nevertheless, it was going to be in our house.
We each grabbed a corner. We each grabbed a corner except for me, because there were five of us and only four corners. I grabbed somewhere in the middle. We reflected for a moment on going back to wake up Steve, but we knew that would be useless. We would have to make do with our current personnel. Steve would just be unable to partake of the 'tub because he had not helped us to procure it. This was our 'tub, to be divvied about to whomever we so pleased. Because it was John's discovery, and because he so eloquently persuaded us that this 'tub was The 'Tub, he would of course be able to keep it in his room. We would put it in the living room, but it would make the room seem overly crowded when people were over drinking beer. It probably also would clash with the wad of Christmas lights up in the chandelier that were the living room's only source of light.
John's room was the only logical place anyway. My room was too crowded, with my big desk and all of my books and my plants and my Atari 2600. I also had a rug. The rug was made of some kind of material and pattern that you would see on the floor of a movie theater lobby from the 50s or 60s. They made those patterns incredibly colorful and hideous because they would never show any stains and they would match anything that was going to be put on them. Well, not match exactly, but there were so many hideous stain resistant colors involved that you didn't need to try to make anything match. This was my strategy in choosing the rug. It worked well; the 'tub would have destroyed the delicate effect of the rug in my room.
Matt's room was out of the question, too. You had to go through the breezeway to get to Matt's room, which would mean waking up Steve. Nobody wanted to wake up Steve. Matt did have a sweet fireplace in his room, but he never lit it, because he didn't understand how the flue worked. We kicked ourselves for having Steve as a roommate. We couldn't use the front door, couldn't use the breezeway, and now we couldn't enjoy the 'tub with a sweet fireplace.
Jeff and Eric's living room upstairs would have been not so bad for the 'tub, but it was beyond our abilities, the five young, strapping men that we were, to get that damn ton of a 'tub up those rickety stairs, and it wouldn't fit through the trap door at the top of the stairs that were in the closet in the living room.
We had a basement, but nobody knew what was down there. We could have had some very quiet neighbors, for all we knew. The basement would not have been a good place for the 'tub, though, because there was no heat down there. What good is a 'tub with no heat? None, no good at all...especially when there wasn't anything else to do in the basement anyway. Nobody knew what was going on down there.
We took the tub through the cold with our bare hands through the icy glaring crunchy snow back to our gravel pit driveway and then to the kitchen door that John usually bounded through. In order to get the tub through the door, we had to remove the shopping cart from the kitchen, because the 'tub was too big to squeeze by the shopping cart, and we were going to be damned if we were going to lift the 'tub over the shopping cart after we had just carried it so reverently down the block through the snow through the gravel pit driveway and to the kitchen.
The shopping cart was stolen. Any time you are in a town with no homeless people and you see a shopping cart and it is not at a grocery store, you can safely assume that it was stolen. John stole this shopping cart. He didn't mean to steal it; he was just in deep thought eating the four pounds of grapes he had just purchased and accidentally forgot to leave the cart at the store. It was a lot of grapes to go through (four pounds of grapes is a prodigious amount), so they lasted all the way until he got the stolen shopping cart to the gravel pit. "That was a good-ass four pounds of grapes," he said, licking his fingers. He kept the cart.
We moved the cart. After the backbreaking labor of hauling the 'tub down the block through the snow in our sneakers with no gloves in the cold to our kitchen, it was simple logistics to move the cart, tilt the 'tub, move it through the living room with no furniture except the console tv, ancient VCR, and Christmas light wad ball hanging from the chandelier, past the closet with the little steep stairway and trap door, into the hallway, tilt again, and flip into John's room.
John didn't have a rug, so the decoration was easy even with the 'tub. John had a drum set. John was a drummer. I was a drummer, too, but I didn't have a drum set. John was a much better drummer than I. Thus may largely be because he had a drumset and I didn't. Also, he played drums all the time.
John would play drums sarting at 8 'o clock almost every day. Nobody really cared about this, for some reason. I still don't know to this day why we would have John playing drums every day and just not care. Our morning conversations would go like this:
*John plays 5/3 beats for several minutes*
Me: "HEY MATT DO YOU HAVE ANY MORE OF THAT MUSIC PAPER"
Matt: "WHAT?"
Me: "MUSIC PAPER!!!"
Matt: "OH YASE! HAVE SOME!"
Me: "THANKS!"
*John switches to brushwork and sizzle*
Matt: "FUCK I LEFT IT IN MY LOCKER"
Me: "Dude why are you yelling?"
I think that for a few days John was trying to figure out a way to get the drums actually inside the 'tub, or, barring that, a way to play the drums whilst being himself actually inside the 'tub and the drums would be without. It never really worked out. We didn't witness this logistics struggle visually; John would have been embarrassed if we saw him struggling vaingloriously trying to put his tubs in his 'tub. We knew that there was a grand purpose to the 'tub, but we were not the ones to discover it. The discovery of the purpose of the 'tub was the destiny of Greg.
Greg was from the sticks. Greg was gangly, towheaded, and talked real slow. Greg never smiled, but everything that came out of his mouth was hilarious. Greg's humor was dry as the desert. Greg spoke softly, but his tongue was definitely his big schtick. Greg was a tuba player. As far as I know, Greg had one outfit: Converse hitops, black jeans, a checkered flannel, and a black t-shirt with the Tasmanian Devil on it. Greg wore this ensemble every day for as long as I remember knowing him. You expected this from Greg because he was just...well...he was Greg. Greg was a lazy man. I recall a time going to Greg's apartment.
"Hey...come on in, man" you would hear from the other side of the door. Greg wouldn't get off the couch when someone knocked on the door. You could be a raving murdering lunatic and it would not have perturbed Greg. You could rush in, turn over all the furniture, set fire to the bedsheets, and smash all the windows with a baseball bat and he would just look at you and say with that twangy twang: "Hey you better settle the fuck down, man." Greg was a man of few words, but when he said them, he took his time. His words were finely crafted. He was a true redneck artisan.
You would walk in his door, and he would be on the other side of the apartment, laying on the couch, looking at the ceiling. In the kitchenette, the water would be running. You would say "Hey...do you want this water on, man?"
"I'm washing the dishes."
"The sink isn't filling up or anything; the water is just running...you want me to turn this off?"
"No, man, just leave it be...I'm using the erosion method." Greg's water at the Egyptian Arms apartment building was free of charge, and as such, he felt entitled to use all of it that he could, because the owners of the apartment building were foreigners. I don't think they ever did anything to Greg specifically or to anyone severally, and I am not even so sure that they were in fact bona fide foreigners, and if they were, from which corner of the world they did hail. As far as Greg was concerned, though, you were a foreigner if you came from farther away than St. Louis. After that, people started talking funny.
Greg came over to 201 S Poplar one night looking for John. We let him in, as we often did. Greg didn't move as fast as John did, and so he took several seconds to make it from the back door through the kitchen, and the living room with no furniture through the hall and to John's room where the new 'tub was. John was playing funk backbeats to John Coltrane Christmas music. Greg had sort of a loping gait that, although it did not move him quickly, it moved him efficiently. His legs were long, and they carried him storklike. He rounded the corner and saw the 'tub for the first time.
Greg didn't show emotion much, but his vocal cadence showed palpable excitement as he strung together a phrase that was at least three times the length of any phrase I had heard him utter before. "Hey, man...you got...you got a 'TUB, man! You got a 'TUB! You know what that 'tub is for, man? That 'tub is for WEED, man! That 'tub is for WEED and I have got to get IN that 'tub!"
I don't think that Greg knew until then that he was a prophet. He wore the mantle of prophecy well, though, for his vision was true. The 'tub was weed; weed was the 'tub. The 'tub was festooned with cushions and blankets and became a two man operation. Those of us who were 'in the know' would sit in the 'tub and get high on Carbondale's finest ditchweed.
I wasn't much of a smoker. I had tried before and never really gotten high, but I got my first enjoyable high "in the 'tub."
Greg and John were in the 'tub. Matt sometimes got in the 'tub. Jeff and Eric got in the 'tub when their girlfriends weren't around nagging them like hens.
Big Kieth Pitts got in the 'tub. Keith wasn't really big; he was sort of tall and skinny, but you wouldn't call him big for regular reasons. Maybe that's why we always did call him Big Keith Pitts. It was just something to do, I guess. Everyone had to have a name.
Agent 20 got in the tub quite a bit. We called him Agent 20 because he looked like Andrew Jackson on a $20 bill. Agent 20 tried to sleep with my girlfriend...everyone tried to sleep with my girlfriend. When we were in the 'tub...it didn't matter.
The girls never got in the 'tub, for some reason. We don't know why. It would have been totally cool...we were a bunch of band nerds; we loved women. It would have been awesome to be in the 'tub with the girls.
Whenever we would have something bad happen, a tough day at school, a quarrel with a girlfriend, whatever..."Hey man; you got to come on in the 'tub."
We would have parties at our house all the time. Marching band people love to drink beer. Cheap beer from kegs. Some of them, when they would be over at 201 S Poplar, wanted to be in the know. They asked about the 'tub. The cool ones got in the 'tub club. It became quite the thing to be asked, "Hey, man...you want to get in the 'tub?"
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dealing with major social anxiety and also jet lag - so, let me get that sorted allittle and i'll call when my brain is better.