Ep. 305: "The Hostess"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
It's going to be one of those, huh?
Hi, Merlin.
How are you?
I'm pretty good.
How are you?
I'm real good.
I'm selling internet perverts.
Stunning.
Stunning.
Your photo's stunning.
Don't let me tell you you're ugly.
You're beautiful.
Smile.
Smile.
Show more feet.
Smile.
Grab the feet.
I did that.
Yeah.
Sometimes I'll do that.
Sometimes I'll click through.
I'll click through to a dude who's there to be an ally.
Yeah, yeah.
I love those guys.
Oh, stunning.
Love it.
Love it.
Yeah.
Super stunning.
Well, you know, and of course, there's really no way you can comment at all.
There's no wrong way to hit on women.
There's no wrong way.
This is America.
Okay.
What's great is that you would think that you were like some rando on somebody's Instagram page and just the right compliment would like put you in the running with them or that they would be like, who is this masked man?
Who is this fascinating guy who thinks I'm attractive?
He thinks I'm pretty.
I know.
He wants me to smile more.
What if he likes my eyes?
Yeah.
You know, as someone who's constantly on the make, as I am.
Are you?
And also being made all the time.
You get made.
I get made all the time.
People commenting.
Just look at my Instagram page.
It's full of people being like, God, you're stunning.
Like, your eyes.
Yeah.
Wow, your eyes.
Has anybody ever told you you have beautiful eyes?
Nobody tells me nothing.
Yeah.
I am a non-player character.
I am a non-combatant.
I have no libido.
I receive no libido.
I have not had libido since the Pixies were popular.
I don't have it.
I'll do what I need to do to get the job done.
But really, I'd rather be looking at my phone.
It is extraneous to need.
I feel so fortunate about so many things, John.
Pound sign, blessed.
I mean, I've got my hair.
But you're not driven.
You're not driven by your animal instincts.
It just feels so desperate.
You know, I mean, I had times where I was very libidinal.
See, part of it is also I started early.
I started very early.
Yes.
Oh, you were hot to trot in military school?
Well, I watched a lot of TV as a kid.
And, you know, one of the overriding narratives is like meeting girls.
And I was easily infatuated.
And that's an important distinction.
I think infatuation is an important thing to be aware of.
It's very different from actually caring about the other person, which I think is something a lot of these guys on Instagram don't realize.
Being infatuated with somebody's photograph is very different from seeing them as a human being.
Really?
Well...
Grab a coffee.
I mean, but who cares?
Listen, teens, it's time to have some serious talk.
I'm going to turn my chair around here.
No, wait a minute.
Were you a Christy McNichol or a Tatum O'Neill?
Oh, all the great girls.
Oh, let's talk crushes.
Let's see.
The earliest crush I can really remember putting my finger on was, I didn't know her name at the time, but Jacqueline Bissette.
Oh, really?
Well, one of the early proto-disaster movies was a Dean Martin vehicle, an all-star vehicle, really called Airport.
Oh, Airport.
And she played Gwen.
She was the flight attendant.
You know, I saw a picture of her the other day, and her name was right on the tip of my tongue.
Thank you for putting it there.
Yeah.
Jacqueline Bissette.
So I fell in love with lots of people.
I was infatuated.
I fell in infatuation with lots of ladies on TV.
Fall in love, I did.
Oh, you will.
Oh, you will.
Judge me by my size?
Wait three seconds.
You know, my first... Stand back, Eve.
I don't know how big this thing gets.
My first crush was Jodie Foster.
Jodie Foster.
Because she was in Candleshoe.
Yeah, right.
And then she was in Bad News Bears.
She was in Bad News.
No, that was Tatum O'Neill, right?
Who am I thinking of?
Oh, no, no.
Was it Jodie Foster?
Who was in Bad News Bears?
It was Jodie Foster.
Tatum O'Neill, she was in Paper Moon with her father.
No, it was Tatum O'Neal was in Bad News Bears.
No way.
Yes.
No, no, no, no.
Yes, I'm afraid so.
Tatum O'Neal.
Oh, she was in the Bad News Bears.
Yeah.
Jody, and so, believe me.
Oh, you know what it is?
Little Darlings.
That's what screwed me up.
Little Darlings.
Do you remember Little Darlings?
Of course.
That was the one that had it all.
It had Tatum and Christy.
Christy McNichol, Tatum.
Tatum.
Ugh.
Well, what was the Jody Foster that I'm thinking of?
Jody Foster.
Well, so she was in Bugsy Malone.
Oh.
That's such a good... That soundtrack is so good.
Her name is Tallulah.
The great Paul Williams.
All the great crushes.
It's got that nut job.
Scott Baio's in it.
Scott Baio.
There's a pie fight.
Remember the pie fight?
Come on, do I remember the pie fight?
I haven't memorized.
I could choreograph it for you right now.
I watched that video.
I have a really crappy DVD rip of that that's terrible, but I'll watch that video, the final scene with little black kids playing the piano, and it starts, and there's the pie fight.
The kid who plays the villain guy is really good, too.
He's great.
And, you know, he's not an actor.
He was just some some British kid that they they they were casting kids.
They're always jamming the British on us.
They were they were casting kids and they were like, who's the who's the biggest bully in the school?
And the kids were all like that kid.
They're like, come here, kid.
We're gonna make you a star.
And I think he just ended up being like some, I don't know, some guy that worked in a factory or something.
You know, because that movie was made in England the same way that Star wore.
Oh, at a Pinebrook Studio type situation.
Yeah, it was one of those.
Yeah, typical jam.
They have big sound stages there.
Real estate's a lot less costly.
yeah well that's the thing london real estate you can have it for a song you can build it anywhere governor get it on your mobile she was on uh oh my goodness she was on so many tv shows dude uh so i'm looking at the uh the movie science page for uh jody foster oh she was on i'm just gonna do oh she did the voice of pugsley adams what i can't even know what pugsley adams is and i'm impressed well i think that was probably the animated adams family
She was on, oh, she was, she was the amazing Chan and the Chan clan.
She was on My Three Sons.
Oh, where was she really?
Oh, she's on, she was a missing child on Adam 12.
How do you feel about Fred McMurray?
I always enjoyed Fred McMurray.
I thought he was sort of like, what, like a TV Jimmy Stewart.
Yeah, right.
But I always, as a kid, I was a little suspicious of TV Jimmy Stewart, I have to say.
Well, yeah, he had those little beady eyes that are too close together.
Yeah, and too much eyebrow, I think.
But then I've always been somebody that's a little suspicious of too much eyebrow.
Because I'm from a low-eyebrow.
well they're blonde i have low q or whatever low eyebrow q oh this is so confusing to me i have low t that's what oh you're low in t you ready for this here's where i got confused so tatum o'neill is with her father playing with her father in the great film paper moon a very good movie right featuring the great madeline khan although he's a bad dad well he is selling bibles
No, no, no, but I mean in real life.
Oh, he's problematic, you're saying.
He's super problematic.
Is he?
Is he?
Not good at all.
He wasn't nice to Farrah Fawcett, is that right?
No, he wasn't good to Tatum either, I'm afraid.
Now, Farrah Fawcett had been with Lee Majors at one point.
Wasn't that a flipparoo?
Weren't Farrah and Ryan before Farrah and Lee?
I don't remember.
But all of those Disney films starring David Niven, I always think of them as featuring Jodie Foster.
But, you know, Foxes.
Do you remember Foxes?
Also starring Scott Bayonne?
Yeah, all of those.
There was a spate of, like, I think PG movies that were kind of playing off the whole, like, sexy, not slasher movies exactly, but playing off the whole, like, sexy teen R-rated movie.
Right.
There was that.
There was A Little Romance, which was very sweet and had Diane Lane.
There was the Mad Magazine movie, Up the Academy.
Oh, Up the Academy.
I think there's a fair amount of sexy stuff going on.
Some of it's fairly problematic.
It's the Porky's problem.
Okay, so here's another thing that's screwing me up.
This is a rat king of actresses.
So, I'm almost done.
Up the Academy is a terrible movie, by the way.
It's not a good movie.
It barely features Alfred E. Newman at all.
I think he's just in the end.
Ah!
But it is directed by Robert Downey Sr.
Robert Downey, he did Putney Swope.
He was a famous director.
I think he did Putney Swope.
It seems to me like you either put more vowels into that than were needed or took vowels out.
I got a lot of problems with them.
What about the name Roger Federer?
How do you feel about that name?
I think that has too many syllables in it, Roger Federer.
Federer.
Yeah.
It just kind of trails off into like a burble.
Putney Swope, 1969, Robert Downey Sr.
Now, here's the problem.
You've got Paper Moon, which is a terrific movie.
It had Madeline Kahn and Joe... Fuck me gently.
Tatum O'Neill played Ryan O'Neill's daughter, Addie Prey, in Paper Moon.
Okay, 1974, you got a TV series called Paper Moon.
Guess who played Addie Prey in Paper Moon?
Jodie Foster?
Jodie Foster.
Oh, that's why?
That's why.
Sure, of course, you're upside down on that.
She was in Freaky Friday.
Alice doesn't live here anymore.
Let me put this to you.
I'm looking it up the Academy.
Yeah.
Two things that might be interesting to you.
Ralph Macchio.
Yes.
The bargain basement Scott Baio.
And Barbara Bach.
Oh, Barbara Bach.
Now, was she married to Ringo Starr?
Barbara Bach was married to Ringo Starr.
I think she was in Caveman.
She was in The Spy Who Loved Me and Force 10 from Navarone.
No, stop.
Shut your dirty mouth.
She was in all those things.
She was just like the, she was the book, she was the bookcase.
If you know what I'm saying.
She was the bookcase.
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What?
!
Was she in her corn?
She was.
She was the bookcase.
All right.
She was right in the center.
Oh, I see.
He's saying she was a tentpole.
I'm saying that she was the walls, she was the roof, she was the floor.
Okay.
All right.
But all of that is by way of saying that you got an early start having boners.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it wasn't, you know, even Freud acknowledges a latent period.
I, from a young age, was attracted to girls my age.
That's all I'm going to say about that.
You were attracted to girls your age?
Yeah, we passed notes and stuff, like in elementary school.
At a young age.
I didn't have a girlfriend.
I did not have an according-to-Hoyle girlfriend until 10th grade.
But I had a lot of little friends.
So if little friends expressed some crushitude on you... Oh, God.
Did you receive the crushitude with, like, cool?
Or were you, like me, a total spazoid nerd?
I'm going to put a fork in that because I want to hear more about that.
There was one instance...
where in probably fourth or fifth grade where i had a mostly over the telephone relationship with a girl from school wow and she was for the first time ever more into me than i her she called you on the phone and you guys talked on the phone and nancy grade that's back when they still had girls named nancy oh nancy you ever meet a nancy today you don't meet a nancy
Haven't seen a Nancy in years.
They don't make them anymore.
If a Nancy came around, I wouldn't believe it.
OOP, out of print, no Nancys.
That's a shame.
What's up with you, Nancy?
What about a Debra?
You don't meet many Debras.
Deb.
Deb.
Lisa, you remember Lisa?
Oh, sure.
Lisa was like the name.
Well, and I knew a Lisa who spelled it with two E's.
Like the mattress.
I don't care for that at all.
Okay, so little friends, and you, so you would, you'd say leave it.
No, no, no, no.
I mean, I was, you know, I was young for my grade, right?
I was always the youngest kid in the grade.
I was old for my grade.
Never the oldest.
And if I had it to do over, I would have said when I was four years and 10 months, I would have said to my mom, can you just...
hold me back please hold me back oh god yes they were that's not what how they thought back then they were like put him forward put him forward and i now i look back i'm like god wouldn't have been great to be the oldest kid in the class it was awesome i'm a november birthday you're a september birthday september and so i always started school a year younger than everybody and then i was like okay now here i am i'm six years old and you know you were like i'm seven and twirling your mustache
But so when girls expressed an interest in me, I always just got really, I mean, still to this day, really like, huh?
What?
What?
Who?
What?
You know, just scared and freaked out.
Do you feel like it might be a jam up?
Well, I just was like, yeah, right.
What's going to happen next?
It's a trap, right?
It's a trap.
But in fifth grade, so in fifth grade, I fell in love with Lori Basler.
Oh, and this is how it began.
But the problem was Lori Basler, Lori Basler knew that she was...
top kid.
Floyd Baszler was top kid.
I mean, Domenidor Gobeleza was like number one.
Please, please say that name again.
Domenidor Gobeleza.
That is a terrific name.
My daughter goes to school with a girl named Chakrasota.
I just love saying it.
I'll seek her out on the playground just to say hi.
I looked up Dominador.
It's a version of Scheherazade.
Isn't that a terrific name?
Chakrasota.
Chakrasota.
I looked up Dominador.
He is very successful.
He's living in Carolinas or something.
Yeah, fuck that guy.
I sent him a text or I sent him a thing on Facebook where I was like, stay safe.
Oh, please don't do that.
Oh, my God.
Just getting the news about what's happening in Disaster State.
Stay safe.
No, I wasn't going to stay safe.
I was going to juggle fucking knives in a rainstorm, you cock.
I can tell from looking at his Facebook page that he's staying safe.
Be safe.
Well, sometimes you look at somebody and they're not being safe and you feel obligated to stay safe.
But in this case, he wasn't.
I don't know.
I don't know if I'm getting over my skis here, but I think you need to be way more safe.
But Dominador was like top.
He was top student.
But Lori was also top student.
And she was also like top.
First of all, top.
She was just top.
So were they kind of fated to be together?
Oh, no, no, no, no.
Lori and Dominador were fated to always get together.
uh they were both teachers pets neither one of them was a was was goody goody they weren't do-gooders they were just like the best at what they were doing they stand out it's it's definitely a thing i don't even know what you call bgoc she's a big girl on campus yeah and they both and they just knew it and it was they had a lot of confidence and they were both lori was dominador was from the philippines lori was like as just as blonde as you could be like just snow white
And I was new to the school in fifth grade.
I had come from Seattle, the big town, and had moved to Alaska.
And, oh, I mean, Lori had a Dorothy Hamill haircut, but it was like the color of straw.
Oh, my God.
And I was like, oh, Lori Basler.
But Lori knew that I liked her.
And she was just like, mm-hmm, I'll put that, you know, I'll put that little three by five card in my card file.
Yeah.
Cards that I don't really care about.
And I was like, ah.
But Chris Fayette, Chris Fayette liked me.
A girl named Chris.
Chris.
K-R-I-S.
Chris.
I'm short for Kristen.
Yeah.
And Chris had... I dated a Chris in high school years.
Well, when I think back about Chris Fayette, I feel like I missed an opportunity.
Now, Chris Fayette had braces and headgear, I'm afraid to say.
But Chris was a great...
That sounds like a confident young gal.
She was a skier.
She had a lot of moxie.
But I just couldn't see Chris because all I could see was Lori.
But I could not have ever talked to either of them as though I were... Oh, it's all academic, really.
You know, I could never have said to Lori, like, hey, can I give you a call on the phone and we'll talk on the phone?
And if Chris Fayette had called me, I would have been like, what?
What?
Who died?
Tried to get off the phone as fast as I could.
Some girl came up to me on the playground that year and said, you know, like...
I forget who it was.
It wasn't Chris or Lori.
It was, you know, Babette or somebody.
She came up and she said, you know, Babette, uh, some other girl, Babette's friend came up and said, you know, Babette wants to go with you.
And I said, go where?
Hmm.
Right?
I mean, like, it's just, you couldn't, it's so bad.
You couldn't, she wanted to go with me.
You already can't fix that.
I didn't know what, I didn't even know what that meant.
I never heard that.
That was very sophisticated talk.
Yeah.
For the time.
I was like, go with, go with, go with where?
And they, all the girls laughed at me then.
They were like, ha ha, he said, go where?
Although I'm sure that was hurt or felt bad.
So no, I didn't.
My first girlfriend was,
Oh, it was much later.
It was much, much later.
And even then I was behind.
I was so far behind.
Uh, well, yeah, she was my first girlfriend and I was in 11th grade and it was halfway through the year, halfway through the year of 11th grade.
so you by the time you were in 11th grade you were always like already like i've been in the trenches i've had it was the beginning of a long career of serial monogamy for sure so that was always your game serial monogamy total serial monogonist i um yes i would
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I would, yes, yes.
The times between the dating times, the dating, dating, that's a term my mom used.
Dating.
Dating.
Are you going with?
Are you dating her?
Do we have an episode once called The Going With Years?
I don't remember.
That was a terrible TV show, though.
Sometimes you get a feeling that you don't understand.
It's the going with years.
uh going with years yes i've i rarely had periods now i was not a cheater and i looked down my nose at the cheaters but but i would do uh well i was a passive aggressive breaker upper did you know cheaters did you know cheaters in 11th grade oh there were cheaters oh it always put me off my beer i guess i wasn't i wasn't advanced enough even to recognize cheaters or cheating when it
Well, and I'm not super bright, so I mean, I'm only aware of about two and a half times I'm pretty sure I was cheated upon.
Oh.
But it was very painful to me.
Dastardly.
But I, yeah, I would move around and then just hang on to the girlfriend as long as I could.
Uh-huh.
And then I'd just start acting passive-aggressive until they're like, ugh.
Oh, whatever.
Yeah, sure.
That's what you want to do.
Just hoping that she'll break up with you?
Yeah.
Is that how it works?
Then get mad.
Get mad and hurt.
Yeah.
I was a bad person.
I mean, I wasn't a terrible person, but I wasn't a good person.
I could have spent more time on my studies.
If I had spent more time with algebra, I think I'd be a better person.
Oh, algebra, you think, is where it dropped off.
Well, it's when I started going to public schools in Florida, and I kind of went down the shitter all over the place, but especially with the math.
And, you know, I didn't take geometry until I was a senior.
Oh, wow.
Oh, no kidding.
I never had pre-algebra.
For some reason, even though I was a very good student in military school, they put me in, like, consumer math, like how to write a check class.
Yeah.
And so, and then I was in, what was I in?
Then in ninth grade, I had algebra.
I did not get a good enough grade.
So I had to take algebra again.
Oh, boom.
I had, I got like a C in algebra.
I had algebra two, if memory serves, in 11th grade.
And then along with the ninth graders, mostly, I had geometry in 12th grade.
Oh my God.
It was really humiliating.
I remember it was around the time that Raspberry Beret song came out.
And I was, I was tall for a geometrist.
Uh-huh.
I loved Algebra 2.
The kind you buy in a second-hand store.
But I didn't like my Algebra 2 teacher.
That's important.
You gotta like your teacher.
He was a jerk.
Do we really need an Algebra 2?
Well, I mean, I enjoyed it.
Is it going to be like The Godfather?
I mean, is it possible it could be even as good as the first one?
If they had kept going, if it had been Algebra 3, Algebra 4, Algebra 5, I'd be in Algebra 5 right now.
How about this in Algebra 5?
Did it make sense to you?
Well, it did.
It did.
Whereas geometry... Geometry is bullshit.
People who like geometry are pod people.
I know people who like and were good at geometry.
I don't want it.
That's a memorizing class.
Yeah, exactly.
I don't want to make a proof.
Give me the answer.
Give me out.
Yeah.
Well, if it's any consolation, the way they teach math now, on the one hand, it is super fucked up, but it's actually pretty brilliant.
The way they teach math now is crazy, and it's so much better for getting into algebra.
I've learned a lot about how the Chinese teach math.
Is that right?
Yeah, because, you know, Chinese numbers...
Instead of like 16, in Chinese, the way you say it, it's 10-6.
And then it's, you know, instead of like...
uh like uh 24 they say 24 right so no dash yeah so it makes a lot of uh it makes a lot more sense uh when you're doing the maths because the the addition oh no no no no i have that wrong 24 is two tens four two tens four yeah 55 is five tens five
So when you just just in the way you say the word thinking in sets.
Yeah, right.
And you're all it's like five, five tens, five plus four tens, four is like, oh, it's nine tens, nine.
Oh, see, then why did nobody teach me that?
I could have learned Chinese math.
That's freaking genius, isn't it?
There's so much stuff.
The way they do multiplication, you do a three-digit number times a two-digit number, and the way they do it is so sensible.
They don't carry the one.
Oh, they don't?
They don't carry a one anymore.
It's not done.
Well, what you'll do is you multiply the bottom number times the top digit, it gets its own line, and each other line you add a zero.
There's no carrying.
No carrying.
You do basic multiplication, then you add it up, and it's all super easy.
I see, I see.
But to watch a child do it when you don't know how it's done is very frustrating.
Because it'll be something like, what's eight times seven?
And she'll have her fingers out.
She goes into this mode with her fingers out, and she'll be like...
Let's see.
8, 16, 135, 62.
And then she comes up with the answer.
I'm like, what are you doing?
It's like, I don't know.
I was doing math this morning because I have a new routine.
You went up long enough to do math?
So I had a new routine.
I set my alarm.
You were early today, John.
That's like the fourth time.
I know.
I was one minute early to our show.
I set my alarm for 8 in the morning.
That's Pacific time.
That's Pacific time.
It woke me up.
I hit the snooze button once, and then it was 8, 10 in the morning.
That's admirable restraint.
Thank you.
I got up.
I put on my clothes.
I got in my car.
I drove over to my daughter's mother's new house in her new neighborhood.
I walked in.
That's over in mid-century modern town.
Yeah, mid-century modern stand.
And walked into her mid-century modern house, said good morning to everyone.
And my daughter's mother said, there was a homework packet that she didn't tell us about that's due this morning.
Really?
And I was like, well, that's weird.
And so I looked at my daughter and I said, homework packet a, and she said, I think I'm going to tell the teacher that I'm going to ask the teacher for an extension.
And I looked at my daughter's mother and I said, where did she learn that terminology?
And my daughter's mother shrugged.
Picked up her keys and walked out of the door to go to work.
And so I turned to my daughter and I said, we are not asking for an extension.
We are going to sit here at the breakfast table and we're going to work on your homework packet.
And my daughter was slightly indignant.
And I said, oh, there will be no indignance.
Let us bring out the packet and begin anew.
And so she did.
And we sat and we did math over breakfast.
Wow.
And it was, you know, and I'm sitting there trying to learn how they do math, but I'm also trying to be helpful.
Oh, talk about cross purposes.
I could already see that one day very soon I was going to be back benched because, you know, I'm like, whoa, what's nine times nine?
It's amazing how much it doesn't help.
You're trying so hard to help and it so doesn't help.
It doesn't help.
But we did complete the homework packet.
And then we walked to school.
And on the way to school, I drilled her on her spelling words.
Wow.
You did all this this morning?
Yep.
And then got her to school.
And as we were walking across the playground, we got to about halfway across the playground.
And she said, I think I've got it from here, Dad.
And then ran ahead.
And I was standing there and looking around.
I guess I'll see you later.
Turned around and walked back over.
To mom's to daughter's mom's house.
And then got in the car, came here, and was a minute early for our show.
A minute early?
You get special points this week.
There's several power dad points there.
Good job.
What I'm trying to do is this is the new new.
This is the new new.
The new new.
The new new is I wake up.
Because I did not go to sleep any earlier than I normally do last night.
I'm a little bit tired.
You still getting four hours a night?
Yeah, about four.
All right.
Popped in, popped in on your other program.
You sounded pretty tired.
Let's say five.
Let's say I'm shooting for five.
Sure.
You round up.
But, uh, but...
But I, you know, I feel like get over there in the morning.
What that does is free mom up to to put on her put on her fancy business bonnet, put on her business bonnet, put on her put on her arm.
She said, I'm interviewing a new candidate today.
And I was like, really?
And is that why you're wearing a motorcycle jacket?
And she was like, yeah, that's right.
That's that's a power move.
She went and I was like, good luck to that person.
Good luck to flip flops.
Let him know his boss.
She was just like, I am the I'm the CIA guy in Sicario.
That's who I am this morning.
But I feel like then we get to walk to school, which seems to me to be the whole game this year.
I love it.
I love walking to school.
It's so good.
Do some homework quizzes.
Make some dad jokes.
Make some dad jokes.
Ask her about her reading list.
You know, all that stuff.
All the great stuff.
Yeah, you got to find those moments.
I mean, nobody cares, but you got to find those moments where like there's nothing that has to be going on and you're both outside of your usual element.
And that's like a lot of times when kids say something cool or offer something up that they wouldn't if they were playing Zelda 16 hours a day.
Yeah, like when my daughter said the other day, she was like, Mama has a drawer in her house that's full of money.
And I was like, really?
That sounds like the beginning of a very good blues song.
She said, yeah, there's a drawer that's full of money.
So the next time I saw her, I said, the next time I saw Mama, I said, is there a drawer in your house full of money?
And she said, how do you know about that?
And I said, well, a little bird told me, but here, word to the wise, I don't know if you've
You know, you're a fully grown person who has a big, big time hotshot job, but don't keep a drawer in the house full of money.
Yeah, bad opsec.
She said, oh, you know, I'm paying workmen and stuff.
And I said, if you got workmen coming through the house, even more don't keep a drawer full of money.
Definitely don't put a sticker with a dollar sign on it.
Yeah, right.
Or a sticker that says drawer, money drawer.
Or not money drawer.
Anyway, we worked it out.
I said, look, put your money in silver.
Use it as a doorstop.
Nobody will ever know.
Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.
Did you know, Merlin, that when I graduated from high school, I was still a virgin?
When you graduated, I feel like I knew something about this.
You had never, boy, how does one say?
In the realm of carnal knowledge, had your fortress been explored at all?
No.
Or, oh, you were unexplored.
No.
Yes, 98% unexplored.
Just on top.
And then I took a year off before I went to college and I traveled around America.
They called it buy year.
I took a buy year.
We didn't call it that then.
No.
We called it couldn't get into any college because of 1.2 cumulative grade average.
Couldn't get into college, so I spent a year hitchhiking.
In that year that I was hitchhiking around the country, I never, ever, ever talked to a single girl.
So you didn't have any hitchhiker sex at all?
None.
Sometimes it'd be one o'clock in the morning, and I would end up in a diner in some little town in Idaho.
And I'd be sitting at a booth in the back, and I'd be watching the other kids my age, which is to say...
And I would be in the same diner, the same age as them.
but i was wearing some kind of denim jacket that had a bunch of dirt on it and i had like dirt twigs in my hair and i'm sitting at the bed and i didn't smoke at the time so i'm not smoking cloves or anything just sitting just having a grand slam and keeping to yourself keep having a grand slam and a milkshake or whatever at one o'clock in the morning
And watching them and going, what would, like, I'm hitchhiking across the country.
Like, I'm like a character in a movie that these kids want to meet.
Yeah.
Right?
Like, I'm the Charlie Sheen in Ferris Bueller's Day Off in this scenario.
Right.
And yet they're not coming over to talk to me and I have no idea how to talk to them.
So I just sat and I wasn't even staring at them.
I was looking at them from under my bangs.
And I can't even recall if anybody did come over and talk to me because if they had, I would have been like, what, huh, what?
I'm not doing anything.
What are you doing?
And then they would have been like, thanks.
And, you know, so nothing.
So then a whole other year after I graduated from high school, still a virgin, still basically.
Was it on your mind?
yeah although i was you know i mean less for the experience than the like this is this is well you know you have a history of wondering what you haven't achieved yet right so was it feeling like a little bit developmentally behind more than the uh the central part of it oh i knew i was developmentally behind i didn't care about that because i was also really um like a moralistic young person right i was like you know you don't want to do something bad you don't want to be like that you don't want to kiss i used to be like that with girls and it was a really bad look
Yeah, and what I figured was if they wanted to be kissed, they would tell me.
And the fact that no one had ever told me meant that no one wanted me to kiss them.
Nobody decent anyway.
Well, I mean, Chris Fayette never even said, I want you to kiss me.
You know, I mean, there were all that headgear.
There were plenty of girls that stood around holding their pillbox hat boxes that had that they had drawn paisleys on or whatever, who were like, what are you doing?
And I was like, what?
Huh?
What?
Nothing.
You know, like there were I just was not getting I was it was not getting through to me.
Then I came back home from my year hitchhiking around.
Now I was a seasoned, like, I had perma twigs in my hair.
Yeah, you're a road warrior.
Road warrior.
uh none of the girls back in anchorage did i really make any kind of like well you gotta have a time and you get settled back in you seen some at that point i'd seen some right i mean it's kind of like that was your vietnam i did get into college at that point i went to gonzaga university i got there freshman
freshman, but I was now the appropriate age, right?
When I started as a freshman, I was now 18 going on 19.
Oh, I get it.
You finally, you're all caught up now.
Right, so I took a year out, and now I'm back, and I'm the age of the other kids.
You were like a red shirt.
Like, you took some time, not like Star Trek, but like, you took a year off, you let your buds grow a little bit, and now you're all ready.
You're ready to get all Catholic.
Catholic college, right?
Is that a Catholic school?
That's a Catholic school.
One would think that were true, but...
I was stunted by all my years of being stunted.
And so here I am, a freshman in college, still a virgin.
And all my freshman year.
Still a virgin.
Do you have a roommate?
I had a roommate, and he was like Joe Player.
Different girl in there every three days.
Oh, boy.
And he was like... Good old Joseph Player.
He was like a slim guy who wore tassel loafers and had swoopy hair, and he was like... He said to me one time... Was his name Blaine?
No, but it was Greg.
He said... He was like, I think I understand why they put us together.
And I was like, why?
They picked the one person in the entire school that I would hate the most?
And he said, no, they put like, and this is, I have no, he said, they put the smartest kid in the school and the coolest kid in the school together.
And I was like, I don't hate you less, even though you paid me a weird compliment.
Yeah.
I hate you more somehow.
There's a whole like a Hegelian two sides of a coin thing going on there.
He didn't even put a sock on the floor.
Let's be honest.
It makes you the ugly sister.
Well, so I would lay in bed and he would be in the bed six feet away from me making out with a girl.
And I would just be – and they didn't seem to care, which also was crazy to me.
Like, doesn't she care at least that I'm here?
Like, I'm not a fun, quiet – like, he's hiding under his blanket.
You're a super intelligent scold.
Well, and I'm – yeah, I'm sitting over there going – like, so mad.
Yeah.
And just – you know, and they would just laugh.
Anyway, so I met a girl.
There was an event where G. Gordon Liddy debated with Timothy Leary about drug culture at Gonzaga.
The trick is not minding.
I did smoke pot at this point.
Oh, boy.
And I went to this event.
I was very stoned.
And I got up and asked G. Gordon Liddy a question, which was, have you ever smoked pot, Mr. Liddy?
Oh, John.
And what I meant to do was say something to the effect of,
don't judge a man until you've walked a mile in his moccasins.
But G. Gordon Liddy turned
And I was, I had walked up to the front.
There was a microphone to ask a question.
He turned on his heel and suddenly he was four feet from me.
No.
You were in immediate proximity to G. Gordon Liddy?
And Timothy Leary.
Legend.
Fucking legend.
I went out with Timothy Leary and a group of students after the thing.
Wow.
But here's, I'm looking right at the point.
I'm looking at the points of his shoes.
Wow.
You know, like he's pointing his toes at me and he turns to me and he goes, no.
Like he says, no, I haven't ever smoked pot.
Did he get out of his seat?
No, he was pacing the stage like a leopard.
Like a jungle cat.
Yeah, with a microphone in his hand.
And I was like, I have a question for Mr. Liddy.
And he, with his back to me, listening to my question, I was like, have you ever smoked pot, Mr. Liddy?
And he turned and was like, no.
And he scared the shit out of me, and I didn't have a follow-up.
And I was like, uh, oh.
Well, you should.
I didn't even say that.
And I was just like,
And I kind of felt like, well, that should prove that.
And I just, we stared at each other.
And then he gave me the most contemptuous shrug, just like, is that all you got?
And I would like, like, like tail between my legs, went back and, but I felt, but I was so, the problem was I was so baked that I, I couldn't decide whether I had done a good job or not.
I was like,
Is everybody in the room right now thinking that I'm an idiot?
I think so.
But also, maybe I got my point across.
I don't remember how to make points at this point.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But then there was another one of those.
So I established myself as somebody that was going to get up at these things and ask questions.
Yeah.
And there was a later one, like not very long after.
My God, what's happening outside?
What the hell is that sound?
That's an unusual siren.
Did you hear that?
That was a siren?
It sounded like your toilet.
Woo, woo, woo, woo.
Woo, woo, woo, woo.
Uh, so you wanted to set, you're setting yourself up.
Everybody knows you're the smart one at the school, but at this point you want to set yourself up as a, that guy who asked the question at the end.
It's really more of a comment.
Yeah.
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Ha ha!
Were you ever that guy?
I was that guy.
I have a question.
I get those comments every time I appear with them.
I have a comment and a question.
But then there was an event slightly after that.
Because this was one of those colleges where they said, oh, we're going to have a thing every two weeks where some...
Some person in the public sphere comes and does a talk or a debate or something.
And it was somebody like – it wasn't Casper Weinberger.
It was probably Lawrence Eagleburger, one of the lower burgers.
Not like a high burger but a lower burger.
But still a big burger, right?
Lawrence Eagleburger is not the smallest burger you ever saw.
Somebody like that was talking about – no, but wait a minute.
I remember who it was.
It was somebody – Was it somebody from the Reagan administration?
Somebody from the Reagan administration, like a legitimate – A hawk.
Was it Alexander Haag?
It wasn't Hague.
It was not.
It was not Casper One.
No, I would have known if it was.
I would remember if it was Hague, but it was somebody.
It was not an undersecretary.
It was like it was somebody that that if I remembered their name, we would be able to laugh, have a good laugh.
Anyway, he was on stage and I was slightly less baked at this event.
And he was talking about how Europe loved America and how his experience of being, you know, the chief of NATO or whatever was that American foreign policy and our anti-Soviet communist, you know, like global hegemony, et cetera, et cetera.
And I got up at the end and I was like, oh boy, this is more of a comment than a question.
I said, it seems to me that in Europe we routinely see footage of giant protests against the Reagan administration where they're burning him in effigy.
It does not appear to us that we are beloved in Europe, but rather that we are regarded as warmongers.
How do you respond to this, this comment that is more than a question?
And he, again, turned on his heel, looked at me and said, have you been to Europe?
At which point I had not.
And I said, no, this was how I should have asked my followup question to G Gordon Liddy.
Have you ever, he was asking me if I'd ever smoked pot, basically.
Have you been to Europe?
He said, and I said, no.
And he said, well, I have been to Europe and I'm
And this is a media bias problem.
The normal people in Europe
regard us as heroes.
And you're just seeing the liberal media.
And this was before that was even a term.
Right.
But what are you going to come back with at that point?
Well, I was just like, I haven't many herbs.
I've got nothing.
But they're sharpening you like a knife.
With each one of these exchanges, you're getting sharper and sharper.
I was getting better and better.
So after the event, the students are all kind of milling around in the lobby of the big theater at Gonzaga.
And this extremely beautiful
And beautiful in my way, which is to say sort of tomboyish.
The Jewish with combat boots.
Super duper, right?
Very, very capable, no makeup.
Kind of like an American Mossad type situation.
Exactly.
Like she was in the Israeli Defense Force.
But this is a Catholic university, right?
So there are no Jewish girls.
There are very few.
Mm-hmm.
She comes over, and she has a little entourage, like a couple of people following just behind her.
Oh, interesting.
Who stand behind her.
Do you clock her as the leader?
Oh, for sure.
She was leading me as soon as she walked up.
And she said, your comment to...
to wine eagle dexter wine weinstein yeah dexter weinberger steen um and i was like i felt a cold fear i was like oh shit she's because you know gonseca was a conservative school and i was i was positioning myself as the liberal there also this was what my dad always did he got into a group of
Republicans and then he was the Democrat of the group, right?
And so this was my job I felt at Gonzaga too, the liberal.
So she comes over and she's like, your comment.
And I was like, oh boy, she's about to, whoever this girl is, she's about to rip me a new one.
And she said, I have been to Europe and I took your observations to be correct.
And I said, really?
Now that's what I call a free exchange of ideas.
And she said, would you like to discuss this further over some hot chocolate?
And I was like, and this was maybe the first time in my life I didn't go, huh, what, who?
Huh.
She disarmed you.
Not with Krav Maga, but with thought bullets, mind bullets.
Yeah, she was just like, let's talk about this more.
At which point, I think she may have even slightly waved her hand and her little entourage dispersed.
She did some Jedi shit.
She was just like... Well, so all of a sudden, I had a girlfriend, and we would walk...
miles the two of us talking just like hands behind our back walking and I would say well and this was like maybe one of the first times that I was like really on in a relationship with somebody where where we were on par and I felt
There was no competition between us.
Like I was not threatened by her and she was not threatened by anything.
And so I would so I would say, you know, everything I know about Catholicism, even though I grew up with Catholics, I went to Catholic school.
Everything was just her explaining to me what it was.
You know, she was like, oh, well, let me explain what the Greek.
tradition was and then here's how Catholicism came out of that and I'd be like tell me more and then we would walk and she would explain she was always explaining things to me and I was always like just learning so much from her because she had this confidence that I'd never seen before and but she also like
She wanted to spend all of her time with me, which I, and I kept wondering why.
It must've made you a little suspicious.
No, because she, there was no, that's the thing about her.
She had no guile, no guile.
She was just 100%.
But I never went to kiss her.
And the thing was, it was not that she wasn't, it's not that I didn't feel that she wanted to be kissed.
I felt that she did.
I just didn't know how because I had never.
I mean, I had that girlfriend in high school, the doctor, and we kissed, but she kissed me first.
And she like kissed me first.
And then that was then it was like, oh, well, I understand now that I can that now I can kiss you because you because you did the thing.
You did the thing where you kissed me first.
So I know that you want me to kiss you.
But this girl, Gonzaga, didn't kiss me first, and I didn't know how to do it.
How long did this relationship continue, roughly?
Months.
Months.
I'm just going to say, I don't want to sound normative.
That's very unconventional for a college relationship.
That's a long time for that kind of tension to be mutually okay.
Well, wait.
We spent 10 hours a day together.
Oh, my God.
And she had a roommate who was a Chinese girl whose name – so Gonzaga, everybody calls Gonzaga GU, Gonzaga University GU.
Her roommate was named GU.
GU.
That was her Chinese name.
What do they call it?
Nominative determinism?
Who knows?
Who knows?
She was fated to go there.
But G was extremely smart.
She was about, I don't know, four foot two?
Tiny.
And she decided, G decided that she didn't want to sleep in a bed, that she was going to live under her desk.
And so G built...
A fort.
This is a, you know... She sounds like a firecracker so far.
This is a college girl.
She lived under her desk.
I love the image of a four-foot-two Chinese girl sleeping under her desk.
That's pretty cool.
She built a fort out of chairs and blankets.
Oh, my God.
So that you could be... Is she seeing anyone?
That's so cool.
She could be... You could be in the room...
She made a room within the room.
Yeah, and my girlfriend and I could be in the room and be in there for hours and not know whether she was there or not.
If you didn't say, G, are you here?
Really?
You didn't inhale one another when they entered and left the room?
No, we spent many, many, many hours in the room.
Not knowing if G was there.
Not knowing if G was there.
And somehow in the relationship between the three of us, it didn't matter.
G was listening.
Every once in a while, G would comment from under the blanket and we would know she was there because she added something to the conversation.
Okay.
Anyway, so my girlfriend and I started sleeping over.
She slept over at my dorm.
That was nice.
I used to really like that.
But no touching.
No touching.
And it wasn't that she didn't want me to touch her or I didn't want to touch her.
It was that she would lay down in my bed, and I would lay down next to her, and I would make sure there was one inch between our elbows.
If that's your arrangement, I had some sleeping with friends in college along those lines.
And it's important to kind of over-orchestrate the deliberateness of the not touching.
But this was a nightmare situation in a way.
Is it a twin-size bed, John?
It was just a tiny little college bed.
No, no, no, no.
Even then, you were a big man.
That's not enough bed for you.
No, it wasn't.
And she wasn't sleeping over because it was like, oh, it's late.
Can I stay over?
It was like she was staying over.
And, you know, my roommate across the room, across the line of masking tape that he put down the center of the room.
Greg.
Greg.
Because any time one of my, like...
pile of dirty items fell across the room, he would kick it back over the masking tape.
I don't like Greg.
Um, he, uh, he was over there making out with girls all the time and, and I and my lady friend were just laying there as chaste as can be.
And here was the problem.
She was Catholic.
A devout, intellectual Catholic.
She was not a—she was like a—she was a— Not as they say, a recovering Catholic.
No.
She was all in.
She was a Jesus Seminar Catholic.
Do you remember the Jesus Seminar?
The ones who looked at the Bible and decided what Jesus really said?
Yeah.
Exactly.
I had that book.
That was a good book.
They applied four levels of certainty.
Instead of just having a red letter edition, you would say, here, they would color it based on our consensus.
This is how certain we are, whether or not Jesus actually ever said this.
Right.
That was a very 90s thing to do, but it was pretty cool.
They would put beads in a jar.
Okay.
And if you were certain that Jesus had said it, you put in a red bead.
Okay.
And if you were like, man, it's a little bit melodramatic.
Jesus might have said this, but it's probably been embellished.
That was a pink bead.
If you thought, I think that this is something that Jesus could have said something like this.
Yeah.
But through the, you know, through the mists of time, it feels like very much a thing that probably.
Somebody said that got attributed to Jesus, something like that.
Or, you know, anytime that, anytime that Jesus, I think the Jesus seminar felt like anytime that Jesus referred to him in the third, referred to himself in the third person, they were like, no, Jesus, that's not how Jesus actually talked.
No.
And then there was a black bead, I think, that meant there's no way that Jesus said this.
This is totally John.
Didn't they count up the beads?
And then they counted up the beads, and it was like majority rules.
Boy, that must have taken a long time, a lot of beads.
It was crazy, right?
That's not exactly how you go about it.
But anyway, she was one of those Catholics.
You can do that with Google Docs now and get it done in like a couple nights.
I know, right?
You send an email around like, or no, you know.
Slack, you get on Slack.
Do a doodle poll.
Mm-hmm.
All right.
Um, so, so she was like really, really, really deep into the like historical Catholicism, but also she was like, you know, she was a Catholic.
She, she was, um, like a real Catholic, smart Catholic.
So she would go on Sundays, communion, whole nine?
Well, it would take me.
Did she go to confession?
Absolutely.
Wow.
Wow, you went to a long-ass Catholic, I guess you had a lot of that at Gonzaga probably, but the Catholics, they got a real long service.
She took me to my first Latin mass.
Latin Mass.
Yeah, yeah.
It wasn't a regular thing, but Gonzaga every once in a while would have a Latin Mass, and she was like, you got to go to this.
Well, there's a name for that.
There's a name for that.
For the Catholics, there's a traditional Catholics, but there's some kind of a name for like the, it could be somebody like, it's not just Mel Gibson, it could be Papy Cannon, but believe in the pre-Vatican to bring back all the bells and whistles.
The Opus Dei creeps?
Well, I think that's a little further down, but yeah.
And there's various levels of canonicalization in the belief in, like, there's some serious fringe groups, some, you know, Judean peoples front shit going on.
She wasn't like, let's go to Latin mass because it's the only true mass.
She was like, let's go to Latin mass because you're not going to see this again.
And you, as a layperson, need this as part of your education.
And she was like, you're part of the laity.
Yeah, we're going to the Gregorian chants now.
You know, she took me through all of that stuff.
And it wasn't just that.
She was taking me to museums, too.
Traditionalist.
That's the word I was looking for.
I'm on the internet science page for traditionalist Catholicism.
But here was the problem.
This was back in the day when I took on everybody else's baggage.
I felt like, well, she's a Catholic and Catholics don't believe in premarital sex.
So for me to touch her and tempt her would be a crime against our friendship and
Because there's no way that she's going to, like, engage in this sinful activity.
Now, I never asked her.
Because she's not waving in like the doctor did.
Right.
She's laying there waiting for me to do something.
Because, you know, I perceived her as somebody with pure confidence.
But, of course, she didn't.
She's not pure confident.
She's a girl who's laying there next to the boy that she likes.
And he's not...
moving on her but he also isn't giving her he's not like trying to break up with her or doing the passive aggressive like just making himself really difficult like I was I showed up really chafing me I showed up at her door and would you know like bright and early
Like, hi, are we spending all day together again, please?
You know, and I would show up over there sometimes and like that was back before anybody locked their doors.
And I would open the door to her room and it would appear to be empty.
And I would say, gee, and I would hear.
I would say, was she reading?
Yeah.
She was a crazy reader.
She just read.
She read for 20 hours a day.
And I would say, you know, is, insert name of girlfriend here.
Is she here?
Have you seen her?
No.
Or she would say, you know, yeah, she went to lunch.
You know, she had, she would, because I was friends with G. G wasn't just some weird girl that lived under the desk.
She was like a, she was like a super great girl that lived under the desk.
Anyway, eventually what happened was that
never made out and there and she started to get frustrated and assumed that it was because I didn't you weren't attracted to her yeah and but we never but this was you know 80s or whatever we never talked she never said this is very sad I don't like this she was like why she never said why haven't you ever kissed me I never said is it okay if I kiss you she never tried to kiss me
Were you afraid of rejection?
Is that what it was?
Were you afraid of rejection?
Or were you afraid of, like, was it more that you didn't want to offend her?
Yep, that too.
I didn't want to impose myself on her.
You don't need one single reason to not do something.
It was that I felt like if it was meaningful, if she really loved me, then it would happen.
And if it didn't happen...
by magic, then I didn't want to, that's the thing.
I didn't want to kiss her and have her passively receive it.
Yeah.
And then I'm in a relationship where I'm kissing her and she's fine with it.
Like I didn't want that.
And that's how I imagined so much of the world was, was people were in relationships and one of the people was just there because they just were stuck there.
And so, you know, we would lay together at night and she would like roll into me, like into the small of my back, or she would try to touch me.
And I would, you know, recoil, not because I didn't want her to touch me, but because I was trying to be honorable.
Mm-hmm.
and eventually like she got a boyfriend oh man who was and there was because of the terms of your relationship well did she did she say that she was attracted to somebody else or was it just like not part of the terms no she just started hanging out with another boy and he was nice and cute was he a greg he was not a greg he was you know a guy he was fine
Um, and then I saw them affectionate with each other and kissing and stuff.
And I didn't, I didn't, I honestly, I had the experience of like not realizing that that had been an option, not realizing that that was when I talked to the doctor later, my doctor girlfriend later and said, why didn't we have sex in high school?
She said, you never tried.
And I said, you mean we could have?
And she said, yeah, we could have all along.
I was always surprised that –
that we didn't.
And I was like, huh.
I'm intrigued that this never came up in some form or fashion.
I mean, believe me, I don't know if you know me, but I have a pretty strong personality.
Um, and if, and if it is a raid toward something or away from something, both things are, I mean, well, it's the thing I was just saying about the other girl.
People think that I, because I seem confident that
That I am confident in all the things I'm doing.
And so it seemed to them that I was confidently not having sex with them for a reason.
Oh, you're throwing that shape.
This is something like, okay, okay, I can see that.
From where they were standing, they had given me every opportunity.
And so for her POV, the girl at Gonzaga, she felt like she had given the signals all along that she was kind of waving you at least partly in.
I would not be averse to something more than just laying very still.
Like I am coming over to your house or to your dorm and sleeping with you and trying to cuddle with you.
And you are rigid like a board.
You didn't want to get it wrong.
I didn't want to get it wrong.
And eventually she was just like, oh, well, you know, I mean, it's college, right?
So you're hanging out with a lot of TikTok.
And then this other boy was like, went in for a kiss.
And she was like, yeah, I mean, it beats not getting kissed.
Oh, man.
And then I was like in the desert again.
And now in the desert of having met somebody who was really like a peer and extraordinary and somebody that I was like absolutely like my whole day was oriented around her.
And now I was like –
devastated and couldn't and then and so she was like so she's got this boyfriend and she's like i mean i guess she wanted to keep hanging out not be it was still she still liked your relationship it wasn't the thing where she was like i never thought of us that way i just always wanted us to be friends it was because because we started to have this talk right at the end where i was like what's going on with this
Well, you know, haha, everything's fine.
But like, what's who's what's this guy?
And and she was like, I thought that you thought of us as something friend only.
And so are we still friends?
And I was like, oh, I don't think so.
I don't think I can be friends with you now.
I'm like super.
I feel super devastated.
And she was like, what?
Huh?
What?
This is.
And it was just like it was awful.
It must have been very confusing for both of you.
It was terrible.
So end of freshman year of college, still a virgin.
That's right.
That's where the story was going.
Still a virgin.
Oh.
I'm now 19 and 10 months, two months shy of my 20th birthday and have hitchhiked around America and also spent a year in college and had a college girlfriend.
And still had never... No one had ever touched my penis.
Okay.
And so at the age of... I'll stop searching for euphemisms.
At the age of almost 20...
Um, so my birthday's in the middle of September in the middle of August, one month shy.
Um, I was out with a friend.
We were driving in the national parks in my four wheel drive truck back in Alaska in the summer.
And, uh, and, uh, we were very stoned and I got pulled over by a park ranger who was also, I was in a four wheel drive Nissan truck and we were four wheeling.
Up above the tree line, actually, by Hatcher Pass.
And this ranger in a blazer, like a big jacked up blazer, came around some rock and was like, boop.
Hmm.
And I'm like, how do you get pulled over on top of a mountain?
And he said, do you have a permit or something?
And I was like, I don't know.
I'm sorry.
And he's like, are you guys stoned?
Sort of.
Maybe.
I don't know.
What do you mean by stoned?
Defined stoned.
Mr. Lady.
He arrested me.
Oh, no.
And he told my friend, can you drive this truck down off the mountain?
And my friend was Peter Nosek.
And he was like, totally.
Thank you, as a matter of fact.
And so he put me in handcuffs in the back of his park ranger blazer and drove me all the way down out of the mountains, all the way down to fucking Wasilla, put me in jail.
I gave Peter my credit card and Peter went and bought himself dinner and videotaped himself.
Oh, yes.
Okay.
It's all dovetailing now.
Yes.
You've heard this story, right?
Yeah, Peter.
Yeah.
Anyway, after we finally got out, he bailed me out of jail.
We finally are in the truck.
We're headed home.
And there was a girl who went to high school with me, but she was a 10th grader when I was a senior.
And now I was two years out of high school and she had graduated from
and was going off to Smith.
Precocious.
And she was having a party at her house.
She was the hostess?
She was the hostess of this party.
This was one of those Ferris Bueller things where the neighborhood... So I grew up in an affluent neighborhood, and the neighborhood across the street from ours was also affluent.
And she was an affluent girl who had a big house.
But she wasn't... She wasn't a snob.
She was just...
I mean, I remember her as a 10th grader as being just... She was on the cross-country running team.
She was a fun... She was having a party.
You were acquainted in high school.
We were acquainted.
She was a member of my gang, but she was, like, young.
She was a 10th grader.
And I was not a senior that... Well, clearly by this story, I was not a senior who was scamming on 10th graders.
I couldn't even get a thing going with somebody my own age.
Yeah.
But so she says... Somehow she connects...
I mean, we were all year home in the summer.
Everybody knows who you are.
Everybody knows where everybody is.
She had gotten an invitation to a party she was having called the Sex on the Beach Party.
And I didn't know what Sex on the Beach was, which is a drink, right?
It's an alcoholic beverage.
Alcoholic beverage.
And at this point in my life, almost 20 years old, if you just said the word sex to me, I would...
you know, I would start to fidget, right?
Just the word sex was, was almost more than I could handle emotionally.
And she was like, come to my sex on the beach party.
Stop saying that.
And I said, I said to myself, like, what, what, what?
Yeah.
You can just freely say such a thing.
You can just freely say sex on the beach and not get flustered and blush.
Like, are you saying this to me because you are, you're in love with me?
And it was just like, no, it's just the name of a drink.
I was like, OK, all right.
So so you do or don't want to have sex on the beach with me.
And it was just like, just I'm just a party.
I'm just come to the party.
And so I'd just been arrested.
Right.
Peter just bailed me out.
And I was like, let's go to this party.
Peter didn't know anybody at this at this party because he went to a different school.
We show up at the party.
It's all the kids that had been 10th graders.
Oh, that's such a weird feeling.
But now they're all graduated.
They're all going to college.
They feel like they're grownups.
They're all 18, 19.
And because I was a year younger, right, I'm only 19 too.
Okay.
So, but I'm, but I also have been out of school for, they all think of me as like a senior, like a veteran of the psychic wars.
Right.
So anyway, drinking, partying, I'm feeling pretty, I had that feeling that you're, that you probably had, which was, I was finally the oldest kid ever.
I remember going back another Prince anecdote.
It was when Kiss was popular.
I remember going to a party.
My friend Brian said, let's go to this party.
It's a bunch of seniors.
It was like a year or two after.
And I just remember thinking it was the strangest experience.
I mean, it was like a dream.
Because it was all people that I thought of as my, not inferiors, but as my juniors.
Kiss!
They were kids, and they were kids, and they were out there with their solo cups and MTV, and I don't know what to think of it.
I did feel a little bit out of place.
Anytime I went to parties that were hosted by younger people, it gave me a little squeaky feeling.
But I did like feeling like a big baller.
Not in the balling sense, but in the sense of like, I'm going to really light this place up with my college-age personality.
And that was me in this situation.
But also, these were the kids that had made up
the rank and file of the group of like college going, smarty pants, you know.
Oh, so they're better than you.
No, they all looked up to me.
Really?
Because I was, because I had been a leader of that group.
I just was the one that got bad grades and hitchhiked across America.
But I was a leader of the preppy smarts.
Okay.
And so here I was at their party.
Like they were really thrilled that I was there.
And it was one of those nights where I was just on.
I was just on my game.
I was funny.
I was being cool.
And at the end of the night, and their kids passed out on the floor.
It was a huge party, right?
Keg cups everywhere.
And the last two people standing are me.
You and the hostess?
And the hostess.
Everybody else has crashed, including Peter, who just wandered off into some back closet and made a nest for himself.
and we're sitting there and she's like so you know it's been great to see you like super glad that you came to the party and i was like yeah i'm really glad i came too and then parents just don't understand kim on the stereo which was a brand new song at the time but i was really keyed in to rap music during this period yeah
And, uh, you know, I knew all the lyrics to boogie boys.
Um, you ain't fresh.
Like I was pretty good at it.
Pretty good at rapping.
And the Parents Just Don't Understand came on, and I sat there next to her on the couch and rapped the whole song to her.
I bet she melted.
And she did.
The hostess.
She's got stamina.
She's still up and at it at this hour.
She must have been really, like, wired right.
Well, because I realized later she had set her sights on me.
She actually did send me the Sex on the Beach party invitation.
Huh.
knowledgeably uh-huh and then she she tolerated your whole misunderstanding about what words mean uh you came to the party i came to the party i was exactly what she'd hoped you're rapping rapping john the star of the party and then there we are at the there we are on the couch and i'm not like rap i'm not putting on a big presentation i'm like rapping in her ear low key real low key that's right like i don't mean to bust your boat
I ordered two Big Macs and two large fries and Cokes.
I got arrested.
The car was impounded.
There was no way for me to avoid being grounded.
And then she climbed into my lap and she was like, do you want to have sex?
Do you want to have sex?
And I was like, sure.
Wait a minute.
For the first time, I did not go, huh, what, what, who?
Because it was all... It was organic.
It was all happening, right?
And she was confident enough that she was like,
What do you, because the thing is, you did actual pants stuff.
This was the thing.
All of the people in my high school thought that I was really good with girls because I was popular.
Everybody liked me.
I was always surrounded by people and girls liked me and girls came on to me and this was visible to everyone else, but not me.
So everybody thought that I was sick, that I was sick.
I'm not a player because there weren't stories going around about how I had... Well, it doesn't need a name.
Their notion was that you were somebody who was confident about dealing with the opposite sex.
You exuded confidence that you didn't have.
Maybe the assumption was that I was having sex with girls that were older at a different school or something.
She's in Canada.
She's my girlfriend in the Niagara Falls area.
Yeah, right.
So when she said, do you want to
yeah okay i was like sure and she thought that she was like uh that this was how grown-ups talk to each other and i was like is it just like this then and we went into a room and she was like all right okay you know but she found like a condom box of them that she had how much longer is this
Oh, you want me to walk you through the whole thing?
I do not.
I'm already uncomfortable.
I know you are.
So, and then everything changed.
Then it happened.
There were pants things.
And then I was, then I had had it.
Did it change your life?
Were you a different man?
Well, so she and I had, for the last month of the summer, had a great relationship.
You had a relationship.
I love hearing that.
She was just, she was very much like the girl that I'd known at Gonzaga.
Smart.
You owe her a Coke.
You should say thank you to her.
Well, I have over the years.
Was she aware of her role?
No, she was not.
She was not.
Rappin' John's not going to let on.
She came to a long winter show in 2006 in Arizona.
That's a long time after.
She showed up.
It was 20 years.
Now we're well and truly into Dan Fogelberg territory.
20 years later, she comes to the show.
She was a Jewish girl.
And she had her like big sort of Gina Lollabrigida, like big curly black mane.
Like 80s mob wife hair?
Yeah, big, big hair.
Well, no, she didn't spray it up.
It just was like that naturally.
She was a pretty natural girl.
She didn't have big bangs or anything.
She had just natural hair.
And it had gone salt and pepper.
So, you know, at the age of 35 or whatever, she had this big curly salt and pepper hair.
And she came to the show.
And after the show, she was like, you know, we were sitting and talking.
And I was like, you know, I lost my virginity to you.
And she was like, what?
Like, had no idea.
And when we were in a relationship.
Who else was there?
Was Eric there?
Oh, you know, I didn't let those guys come around when I was talking to a pretty lady.
Get in the van.
Yeah.
I got some business to settle.
You know what?
You guys go wait on the other side of the bar.
I'm going to talk to this.
Cool.
Cool.
Cool.
Cool.
Cool.
Cool.
I heard something about 24th and mission.
Cool.
Cool.
Cool.
Cool.
Oh, save me.
Save me, bell.
Yeah.
I need some beef jerky or something.