PUKEBOX HERO

When I was in high school in Duncan, Oklahoma, the nearest places to see touring rock bands were Oklahoma City and Norman (just south of OKC). The first rock concert I ever went to was at the Oklahoma City Zoo Amphitheatre. It was the Beach Boys. They were terrible. I, of course, was unaware of this, as it was my first show. But make no mistake. They were terrible.

The second concert I ever went to was to see Foreigner in the spring of 1982. I think. Could have been fall of 1981. And it could have been the third concert I saw, with The Police and (I think) Joan Jett and the Blackhearts being the second show. But anyway, I know I saw Foreigner, because I remember crowding down by the stage when they inflated an enormous, rubberized, juke box on stage during their performance of “Juke Box Hero,” which I thought was pretty cool, despite the now-obvious not-at-all-coolness of it.

Couldn’t tell you much else about the show. I think Survivor opened for them because I know I saw them twice that year, quite by accident, as they were apparently the default opening band for every concert tour taking place in 1982.

Anyway, I do remember buying a three-quarter-length-sleeve t-shirt as soon as I got to the venue, for which I paid way too much. Something like $20, which is the equivalent of…calculating…calculating… $49.58 today, an irresponsible use of a teenager’s money. The silver lining here, if there is one, is that it is literally impossible, in 2014, for teenager – or anyone else, for that matter – to buy a softball-style concert t-shirt at any price. So…progress!

I bought the shirt, not so much to have a souvenir of my second – or possibly third – rock concert experience, but because the shirt I was wearing when I left the house, some 2 hours earlier, was soaked in vomit and beer. Mostly vomit.

TRIGGER WARNING: THE FOLLOWING PASSAGE MIGHT BE A TRAUMATIC TRIGGER FOR PERSONS WHO SUFFER FROM EMPATHETIC NAUSEA. YOU KNOW, LIKE, WHEN YOU SEE SOMEONE ELSE BARF AND THEN THAT MAKES YOU BARF? THAT KINDA THING? YEAH, WELL, BRACE YOURSELVES.

So, here’s what happened. I went to the concert with two, possibly three, friends. Not sure if there was a fourth member of our traveling puke posse. But the two I do remember were a coupla guys I’ll call Curt and Ron. (Not their real names, but really, really, close to their real names.) We were driving in Curt’s car, a classic 1968 Pontiac GTO, a muscle-bound beast of American-made automotive beefcake, which was incapable of NOT drawing attention to its occupants. Especially when those occupants are 17, 16, and 15 and are racing up Oklahoma State Highway 9, a two-lane, shoulderless, ribbon of blacktop winding through 30 miles of hills and woods between Chickasha and Norman.

The Highway 9 run was as close to a live-action video game as one could get without putting a quarter in a slot somewhere. So, naturally, we were all drinking Little Kings Cream Ales (“Cincinnati’s Finest!”) while navigating the highway’s twists and turns.

There are two important things to note at this point.

Thing 1: The Little Kings were warm. Well, mostly warm. We’d purchased them at a liquor store and, by law back then, liquor stores could not sell cold beer. This was intended to discourage drinking and driving. I suppose. For some reason – I’m gonna go with stupidity – we didn’t have an ice chest, so we iced down the beer by simply placing a bag of ice on top of the loose bottles of beer in the back floorboard. (Which probably means there wasn’t a fourth guy, because that’s where his feet would have been.)

Thing 2: Ron had mentioned early on that he wasn’t feeling too good. Something about his stomach. He attributed his discomfort to the meal he’d wolfed down just before getting in the car. Beef stroganoff.

So…we’re cruising along Highway 9, without a care in the world. Yet. It was late evening and the sun was setting to our left, casting golden-tinged shadows across the buffalo grass and ponies and buttercups. We drove over hilltops and dipped into valleys and caught fireflies in Mason jars and turned up the music real loud and laughed and even more ponies and teenage-memories-in-the-making and blah blah blah BARF.

Didja ever see “Pulp Fiction”? Remember the scene where John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson are driving with some kid – I think his name was Marvin – in the backseat and Travolta’s gun accidentally goes off, spraying essential pieces of Marvin’s head all over the back windshield?

Yeah. Well imagine that scene, except Ron is Travolta (technically, I guess, Ron was not “Travolta” but rather, “Travolta’s gun”), and instead of Travolta in the front and Marvin in the back, it was vice versa, with me in the front and Ron DIRECTLY BEHIND ME in the back. Oh, and instead of essential pieces of Marvin’s head on the back windshield, it was a semi-digested-beef-stroganoff-outline of my head on the front windshield.

It was the worst moment of my life. And that includes the 2000 Texas-Oklahoma football game and the time my kids caught me really, really, singing along to Adele’s “Someone Like You.”

There was, literally, no warning – unless you count Ron’s actual warning an hour earlier that his stomach was upset, which I don’t. And here’s why: I really wasn’t paying attention and did not think it had anything to do with me.

Continuing, Ron said later the reason he gave no warning was because he didn’t receive one himself. “It was as big a surprise to me as it was to you.” were, I believe, his exact words. Unless I just now made them up. Who cares? HE VOMITED ON MY HEAD.

Anyway, as soon as I felt the warm, beery, putrefaction hit my neck, scalp, and ears, I skidded off the narrow road and into the tall grass alongside State Highway 9, where I ripped off my shirt and pretty much had your basic teen-movie-road-trip-hijinks-gone-bad meltdown. I was as frenzied as a human has ever been.

But, interestingly, I was not nauseated – as I’m sure many of you are now. I mean, we’re talking about noodles hanging from ear my like costume jewelry. Some of you are probably gagging at this very moment. Amiright? Anyway, mostly I was just pissed. I pulled fistfuls of tall grass from the ground and used them to scrub my hair, all the while cursing Ron for VOMITING ON MY HEAD.

Meanwhile, Curt’s attention had been drawn to the loose beers bouncing around the floorboards and observed that they too had been impacted by Ron’s Mighty Heave. Leaping into action, he segregated the contaminated and uncontaminated bottles from each other, storing the ‘clean’ ones in the passenger side of the back seat – perhaps the only patch of unvomited-upon real estate in central Grady County – and delicately shook the vomitus from the ones that had suffered a hit, placing them temporarily on the roof of the car. The initial beer triage complete, he pulled the ENORMOUSLY contaminated floor mat from the back seat and shook the ice and puke and whatnot loose into the tall grass. He then put the putrid floor mat in the trunk, where he found an old towel to use as a temporary replacement mat.

All in all, it was both an efficient and effective process, especially considering the circumstances. I probably would have complimented him at the time, had there not been a bunch of vomit in my hair.

I was, sort of, coming down from my hysteria at this point and realized that, ever since we’d pulled over, Ron had been moaning “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” like a condemned man. He then walked up to me and said, again, that he was sorry, this time adding what I can only describe now was a Man’s Man’s Offer Of Conciliation:

“Hit me, man!” he wailed, pointing at his chin. “Come on! Hit me! Do it!”

This made no sense to me.

For starters, Ron outweighed me by about 50 pounds – with his chin alone representing at least half of that difference. I would certainly have broken my hand in the exchange. Plus, I didn’t want to hit him. I wanted to be NOT VOMITED ON. Failing that, I wanted to find a bathroom as soon as possible, so I got back in the driver’s seat.

So, Curt put the semi-reclaimed beers back in the floorboard; Curt, Ron and Ron’s chin climbed back in the car; and I pulled us back onto the road. A few miles later, we pulled into a service station and I parked by the pumps, so Curt could use the water hose to continue the Little Kings Reclamation Project.

Vomit-soaked shirt in hand, I went into the bathroom to wash up in the sink and wash out my shirt – a plan which, of course, hit an immediate obstacle. I wish I could draw you a picture of this sink, but since I can’t I’ll just say that this joke of a fixture could only have been accurately called a sink because of its placement in a bathroom. The exact same thing, if located anywhere else, would have been confused with an ashtray or, perhaps, a really inconvenient thimble.

Everything about it was wrong.

It was about 8 inches across, 8 inches wide, and 4 inches deep. And the faucet was situated in such a way that, if one were properly motivated, one might have been able to fit a single tennis ball between the mouth of the faucet and the bottom of the basin. Even my attempts to fill my cupped hands with water were foiled because only one hand at a time could fit between the faucet and the edge of the sink.

It didn’t help matters that the water was coming out of the faucet with the force one usually associates with a bomb squad member snipping the blue wire or a mother’s soft caress as she brushes the hair away from her sleeping baby’s eyes.

The water from this sink didn’t so much wet things down as it teased and tickled them gently in a slightly dampening manner.

In just under three minutes, my entire head was almost wet.

What little progress I was making in the Barbie’s Playhouse Bathroom was cut short by the sound of raised voices outside. I stepped out into the parking lot and saw Curt, again, casually dealing with the beer cleansing process. This time, he was pulling beers, one at a time, from the rear floorboard, thoroughly rinsing them with the station’s water hose, and lining the “clean” bottles on top of the car. Ron, in the meantime was alternately yelling at Curt to get in the car and at me to hurry up and get it in the car. I attributed my more detailed directive to the fact that I was still some distance from the car. But from his tone, it was pretty clear to me he wanted both of us to hurry, so it seemed kinda, oh, I don’t know, gratuitous and shitty to single me out as the guy holding things up. I mean it’s not like I was the one who VOMITED ON SOMEONE’S HEAD IN THE FIRST PLACE.

But as I made it past the corner of the building, I could see why Ron was so urgent. It seemed our unorthodox pit stop had gained the attention of the service station owner – a bowlegged and elderly gentleman – who was currently wobbling his way, quite angrily, across the parking lot to the car.

Curt hurriedly rounded up the beers and I jumped behind the wheel, still shirtless, and we took off, spraying twin rooster tails of gravel at the angry, wobbling man – who still managed to take a swipe at the car with either his boot or his cane (did I mention he had a cane?), leaving a dent in the left rear fender.

I drove the rest of the way with my beer/puke/moistened shirt hanging out the window, so it would at least be dry when we got to the show. Which we finally did. I bought my softball shirt, put it on right there at the merchandise table, and watched the rest of the show from the concourse. Until the juke box part started. Because I gotta admit, that was pretty cool.

© 2014 Lee B. Weaver