Sleeping With Boots On
Is a good way to get covered in cabbage.
I once passed out drunk with my boots on.
This was, unbeknownst to me at the time, a most severe social faux pas among the skinheads I partied with. Severe enough to describe it in French when just about any other language is available. That’s pretty serious. I could have called it a mistake, an error, or even misstep would work. Cuz boots, right? Get it? But faux pas it is, and a most pas it remains to this day.
Boots are important to skinheads. I'm not entirely sure why. I've been told a bunch of different reasons for the fascination with footwear. They wear them because no hippy ever would. They wear them to show off working class bona fides. They like shoes with descriptions also capturing the physical appearance of eldritch, ancient gods, like twenty eyes. Or they like to take their shoes on and off akin to a man married two years having to suddenly schedule masturbations around a full house. It’s an event.
None of these assertions are likely true. But when faced with an array of equally unlikely explanations, the most awesome one is worth believing. I call this Lamb's Razor. Not to be confused with what my wife has unkindly dubbed my penis, but don't worry about her. She's a bit of a hippy, though her words are sharper than I could ever hope to hone my genitalia through forging and folding my flesh to a fine edge. Still, she lacks the killer instinct my high school guidance counselor possessed.
The important part is skinheads feel strongly about not falling asleep with boots on. It’s an odd little thing, but if you pass out with boots on, you can expect reprisal. Dicks drawn on faces, showered in vegetation, perhaps moved to the roof and hung upside down. The point is, don’t fall asleep with boots on like I did.
Anyway, earlier that be-booted evening, pre-faux pas, we’d determined it was too warm in our tiny, single studio apartment in Spokane over in the Browne’s Addition neighborhood. There was no real ventilation, and it was made of hot, somehow moist, spongy wood, but most of us were too young to just drink outside. Worse, the vegan dude paying rent liked to rub two styrofoam packing peanuts together as some sort of nervous tic. He carried them everywhere. The sound comforted him but it had the habit of driving me nuts while also snapping my rectum quite shut like nails on a chalkboard or Kamala Harris' laugh does.
There was no ice in the fridge, just a rotten, depressed cabbage alongside a sad cucumber, accompanying racks of Black Label Beer, looking like that one straight-dressed couple with glasses among a sea of liberty spiked peers. The cabbage knew better than to start anything that night, and the cucumber mad dogged me, daring me to find a use for it, but I don’t recall finding one that night.
Which doesn’t mean I didn’t find one. Just that I don’t remember doing it. I don't actually remember any of this. Nor any doings therein. This story was related to me by a concerned citizen witness. This concerned citizen witness never lets me forget it.1 I, having blacked out, have no choice but to accept his version of events. Perilous. But the story is as follows.
To cool the place a bit, we set out rather drunk into the night with a target in mind. One of us had recalled an equipment rental place not too far off. They weren’t open, of course, but a chain-link fence is as good as an open door to a drunk teenager. I promptly scrambled over the fence, seized a fifty pound, three-foot-wide fan, and somehow chucked it back up over the fence at my waiting co-conspirators, one of whom was crunked straight in the head with it, causing its safety guard to fly off.
With no time to find the damned thing, we hauled ass back to the apartment. We ran upstairs and into the pod, plugged the giant fan into the wall, and fired it up. A sweet, sinful breeze spun up to slay our sweat. Three feet across, smooth silver aluminum, and mostly silent, this fan was perfect. Other than the missing safety guard, of course. It was just open, spinning endlessly, promising to dismember any number of drunk idiots willing to put their penis, hands, or heads in it.
Being a responsible minded individual, this did concern me somewhat, if no one else. These guys were risk-takers. Absolute maniacs. Shaved heads, excepting those with tri-hawks2, they looked and sounded mean. From the outside. On the inside, they were big teddy bear man-children who occasionally needed dangerous nonsense pointed out to them before getting a pedophile’s fishing lure stuck in their penis. I kept looking at that whooshing fan blade, free of restraint or warden, ripping the open air to pieces and promising the same to any of us.
“That is so dangerous,” I’m told I yelled while pointing at the fan. “Danger! Danger!”
This earnest warning was met with mostly laughs. Laughs ceasing the instant I threw that tired old cabbage into the exposed, whirring fan blade. I must have delighted at the sight. My buddy Zack told me I was in such a tizzy, screaming about danger, I circumcised the cucumber with the fan blade and ate the tip, too.
Now, I have reason to doubt this story is true. The first of which is no one actually enjoys the taste of cucumber, including me. I would never eat one. The lettuce thing? Yeah, okay. Maybe. Probably. Almost certainly. I’m told I passed out not long after and when I woke up, I was covered in cabbage and a cucumber missing just the tip. They said they wanted me to lay down in what I’d done. I admitted to the cabbage, to my unending credit. Too many witnesses to deny it.
But the cucumber remains a mystery. The story didn’t add up. The evidence didn’t support the claim. As mentioned, there’s no way I would eat the thing no matter how it was cut and speaking of the cut, it didn’t resemble a fan blade cut at all. Lacerations would only be present on one side of the cucumber, but it more resembled something placed inside something else which then removed the tip from all sides at once, suddenly and powerfully. I don’t know what could have done that.3
The point, once again, is don't fall asleep with your boots on. I don't know anything else. All I do know is that nervous vegan just kept looking at me, rubbing those styrofoam peanuts together, grinning like an asshole.
Sic vivitur.
I hope you enjoyed reading this story more than I enjoyed being told it. I also hope you enjoy some scary skinhead music.
This concerned citizen’s name was Zack, except not really. You’ll never guess his name.
A tri-hawk is, as you likely guessed, three mohawks cresting a single majestic dome.
If you do, please don’t tell me. I’ve already spent thirty years denying it.
I am formerly adopting Lamb’s Razor into my lexicon.