Recently, I invited a longtime friend of JMEN, Mike Ritz, to revisit his role as guest blogger.
Ritz and I have suffered as Cincy sports fans together since our days as social/intellectual juggernauts at The College of Wooster, so when he asked for a topic, I immediately thought "Bengals".
As the Bungles stumble their way toward another side-door entry into this year's NFL playoff party, it seemed fitting to examine whether reason for hope exists. Or if, as has been the trend since Operation Desert Storm, these pussy-ass cats would continue to lose and lose and pathetically lose.
Just as I knew he would, Ritz gave it some serious thought and came back with the answer.
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When Reed asked me to organize my thoughts on what it would take for the Bengals to win a playoff game, I paused to contemplate the magnitude of that request. I paused because we as Bengals fans seem to have recently forgotten the historic futility of this team. When WAS the last time the Bengals won a playoff game???
Bandwagoners (and myself, admittedly), emphatically point to the fact that the team has made the playoffs two out of the last three years – and now is realistically on the way to sneaking into three of four – as evidence they’re not that bad; however, I had to consult Google to confirm what I’d feared. The last time the Cincinnati Bengals actually won a playoff game was January 6, 1991.
A lot has happened since the start of 1991. I won’t try to cheesily put it in a historical world events perspective, but I know that seven-year old me thought that sports fandom was always supposed to be this easy. The underdog Reds were coming off a convincing World Series sweep of the juicing juggernauts from Oakland, and the Bengals were only two years removed from fourth quarter heartbreak at the hands of a now-legendary Montana/Rice San Francisco team. Those days, we figured we were one more Bay-area earthquake away from Cincinnati being the center of the sports universe.
How was my innocent young self to have known the Sisyphean frustration that would follow me these last 20+ years?
So many what ifs.
What if Mike Brown hires a scouting department to insist he give Jeff Blake some O-line protection to throw those beautiful deep balls to Carl Pickens and Darnay Scott? What if Brown takes Ditka’s Saints up on the offer of a whole year’s worth of draft picks to trade up to number 3? (A number 3, who we Bengals fans remember all too well, was promptly spent on used-car-sales-hall-of-famer Akili Smith. The next three picks? Edgerrin James, Ricky Williams, Torry Holt. Maybe you’ve heard of them.)
What if Carson Palmer’s knee has a weaker Kimo von Oelhoffen magnet? What if Chris Henry doesn’t break his arm on that crossing route and subsequently gets to spend the rest of the fall bonding with his teammates instead of chasing pickup trucks? (Too soon? RIP.)
When people are feeling full of wisdom, they’ll lament that you can’t change the past. Some people, feeling even deeper and wiser, will tell you the past is the only thing you can change. Unfortunately, this more enlightened latter angle doesn’t extend to results of sporting events. You can laud the Wicked Witch’s good intentions; you can revise the motives behind any number of historical evils that have been committed; you can convince yourself of your faultless, impeccable past relationship behavior. But you can’t undo the fact that, not long ago, we had to talk ourselves into Jon Kitna saving the day.
And it ended how we expected it would.
So what would it take for the Bengals to win not even a Super Bowl, but just a playoff game? Seeing as though I was seven years old when they last won a playoff game, I figured I should put myself in an early-90’s, childish mindset to answer this question.
I won’t pretend I remember everything about myself in elementary school. I wore sweatpants just about every day. I was obsessed with my Reds and my Bengals. I was way into He-Man, Ninja Turtles, and Super Mario. And I read a lot of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books. They were great. If you accidentally walked into the cave and got eaten by a bear, you could flip back to the last choice you made and do the other thing. Maybe opening Door Number Two results in slaying the dragon and getting the princess.
When you’re a kid, this seems slightly plausible, if not completely realistic.
Early 90’s Me had other influences pushing this alternate revisionist narrative on me as well. You’ll all fondly remember the classic Wayne’s World gimmick of sad ending/other ending/happy ending. Of course! Why shouldn’t a movie have three endings? (This is the part where I link to Youtube clips and we all get a laugh about how great Wayne’s World was. None of the links for the endings seems to be working. Thanks, copyright Nazis. Oh well, at least there’s this.)
Plan B…
Probably less well-known, but an interesting different example of re-doing endings until you get it right, is Harry Chapin’s song “30,000 Pounds of Bananas”. (Aside: whatever you think you know about Harry Chapin being a one-hit wonder is your loss. Great storyteller.) This song had everything a young kid could hope for in a song: frantic tempo changes, guys saying the word “bananas” in funny voices… and that’s about it.
Oh, and multiple endings.
If you’re unfamiliar with the song, it’s based on the true story of a truck driver who lost control of his truck going down a hill into Scranton, Pennsylvania, and flipped, killing himself and spilling his load of bananas all over the road. The song downplays the tragic nature of the accident, of course, choosing to focus on the imagery of a truck (and consequently the song) picking up speed and mashing bananas in the street, which was a fun little story for the young son of former Harry Chapin groupies.
Performing live, Harry would walk the audience through his writing process. He’d play each ending that he’d written before he was ultimately told by a friend or family member, “Harry, it sucks.” Then he’d talk about his rationale behind the next ending he wrote, before that one ended up sucking too. Eventually though, however many endings it took the song to wrap up, he told you what you wanted to hear – a silly story about smashed bananas and not much about a tragic truck wreck. With the opportunity to re-write his endings, he could change the past, but without changing the past.
Young me loved this song, although obviously not as much as I did learning every pointless stat of everybody on the Reds’ roster, obsessively organizing my collections of baseball and football cards, and watching the Bengals. Of course back then I didn’t know many of the ins and outs of football. I didn’t even know who Mike Brown was, so I wouldn’t have known that he took control of the Bengals after his father’s death, let alone the significance of that inheritance.
These past twenty-some years of Bengals futility are sort of like the runaway truck and the subsequent writing of the song. You can focus on the positives, like “a lot more people could have died,” or “the team isn’t finishing 3-13 every year now.” You can change the narrative from a story about a fatal accident to a crowd-pleaser about mashed bananas; or from a story about a bad team to stories about young guys making the Pro-Bowl, or about people like Adam “Pacman” Jones turning their lives around and being a positive influence on younger players and their community.
But this is where the fiction parts from the reality. Whereas Wayne and Garth were able to re-choose their own adventures, Harry Chapin’s work of “fiction” was only able to shift the focus of his narrative. The truck still flipped; Bengals fans can’t bring back the near-magic of the 2005 season. We don’t get a do-over on trades missed, bad free-agents signed, and receivers overthrown. As Eminem recently reminded us, "You don't get a second chance; life is no Nintendo game." We can only gloss over the fact that Mike Brown will always be driving our runaway truck, wonder what if, and look ahead to next year.
As much as we like to cheer-lead and talk each other up about this being the year, it won’t be, just as it hasn’t been since Boomer Esiason was a spring chicken. Best case, this year’s team sneaks into the playoffs and then goes into New England or Denver in the first round and gets carved up by a future hall of fame quarterback. Whether it’s Brady or Manning, he’ll be playing with a chip on his shoulder for not having a first round bye, and will take that out on our boys in stripes. We can ask “what if” about those awful losses to the Dolphins or the Browns or the Cowboys (or God forbid, the Steelers or Ravens), but the fifth and sixth seeded teams in the playoffs this year will run into a buzzsaw. This is preordained, and our runaway frustration has no brakes.
We can watch film and point fingers afterwards, but the players can’t go back and undo the mistakes they made on the field that led to another disappointing first round exit. There are no opportunities to retry Door Number Two. All they can do is wait until next fall for their next opportunity to start pushing that boulder up the hill again. Towards the top of that hill is another 9-7 record, and maybe another wildcard berth before that big Brown boulder barrels back down the hill, smashing tons of bananas and our hopes yet again. Then the cycle repeats itself.
So what will it take for the Bengals to win a single playoff game? After some serious soul-searching, I really don’t believe it’s possible.
Then again, I did read somewhere about this thing called a reverse-jinx…
Mike Ritz
JOURNEYMEN Guest Writer and Chief Music Historian
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Feel like getting into the conversation? Think we suck at this and know you can prove it?? Want to immediately become a worldwide sex symbol??? Contact me directly for a chance to join the JOURNEYMEN guest blogger circuit.
On Tuesday, the greatest Major League Baseball team ever to grace a ballfield announced a somewhat stunning trade they’d been working on for weeks. In exchange for their strikeout prone center fielder (Drew Stubbs), the Reds worked a deal for the Indians’ star right fielder, Shin-Soo Choo. The deal was immediately lauded on a number of levels (some of which I’ll touch on at some point later), but the one that stood out to me the most was the simple fact that, as fans, we’d no longer have to watch Stubbs treat his at-bats like blindfolded pinata sessions.
In short, Cincinnati had capitalized on the age-old strategy of addition by subtraction.
Now, to explain addition by subtraction in statistical terms is certainly doable. One would need only to compare Stubb’s lack of production with what anyone (seriously, ANYONE) else could provide, and you’d have your answer.
However, that instructional approach seemed way, way too boring.
So, instead, I give you this....
Case Study #1: As a teenager, I played on a spring soccer team called the Dayton Flood. Most of us had played together for years, so we all knew each other pretty well. We’d face off every fall with our school teams, our parents all got along, and we’d have end-of-season pizza parties that would last until like 11pm. We were like a little family.
However, every year at our first practice our coaches would present us with a few dudes we’d never seen before. We’d stand in the circle, they’d tell us who they were, and then they’d spend the rest of the evening trying to prove they weren’t completely worthless (or at least that’s how I remember it.)
Typically, we welcomed these one-year mercenaries. Guys like Derrick Harrell, who only had one move (dribble to the corner and fall down), but were nice enough that we found ways to utilize their one-trick pony show. Or guys like Rico, the French dude who insisted everyone call him “Butter” because his moves were so smooth. (Rico would eventually get “too cool” for soccer (read: fat) and quit, but he lived on in Flood lore because he was flat out hilarious.) In short, team cohesion was rarely an issue because we were all pretty nice dudes. And, let’s face it, no one was really trying to win a World Cup.
But then there was Aaron Finkel.
We all hated Aaron Finkel’s guts. He was one of those kids who was about half as big as everyone else and used his mouth to make up the difference. His shin guards were always too small, his hair was curly and stupid, and his shots on goal always went wide. The perfect blend of personally annoying and athletically worthless. He’d spend practices talking about stupid shit like how high the diving board was at his pool, or how much money he got for his Bar Mitzvah. At one point he even tried to fight Butter, which made every single one of us want to tie him to a rock and throw him in the river.
To put it plainly, Aaron Finkel was a little bitch. He was eventually forced off the team, and immediately we got better. Partly because he was straight up garbage on the pitch, but mostly because he was a total dickhole. We’d never pass to him, which basically turned our 11-man team into a 10-man team and gave all of our enemies a distinct advantage. So, not only did jettisoning Aaron to the Jewish Community League make us 100% less angry, it also allowed us to once again become the lethal futbol juggernaut that the Miami Valley had always feared.
Addition by subtraction.
Case Study #2: When I was 23, I dated a girl who was 19. Originally, I was drawn to Lisa (sure, let’s call her Lisa) because she was cute, full of youthful energy, and seemed mature for her age. And for a while it worked, even though I was in grad school and she was only a sophomore in undergrad.
Then, one night, my grad school friends and I got drunk. We’d just finished exams, were coming off 4-5 hours of half-price margaritas, and had just returned to my place to keep the party going when my dalliance with a teenager became the topic of conversation. Perhaps it was the fact that Lisa had just been up to visit, or perhaps it was the 20 liquid tons of tequila that we’d accounted for, but for whatever reason, my friends decided to come clean.
For about 20 minutes, they sat there and told me all the reasons Lisa sucked. She was clingy. She was flighty as all hell. And for God’s sake, she was still taking classes that ended in “101”. Naturally, I didn’t respond well. Like most people do when their blood alcohol level is .37 and they’re being attacked, I got really defensive and basically told them all what they should shove in their mouths. They were supposed to be my friends, but instead they were acting like a bunch of predatory jackals.
Eventually I just told them all to get the F out and to kindly get molested by the hobos on the walk home. But I didn’t forget that fight. Because, if I was being honest, I knew they were right. Not only was Lisa a college sophomore who still doused herself in hairspray for frat parties, she was also kind of, as they say in France, a bonehead. Our conversations were never actually about anything meaningful, and yeah she came to my lectures, but she also sat glassy-eyed through all of them, doodling flowers on her notepad and trying to hold my hand under the desk.
She was a child, in a lot of ways, which is why when It came time to break up with her (barely a week later) it seemed perfectly acceptable to do it over AIM (shutup). In the middle of one of our typical cyber arguments, she suggested that “maybe we should just take a break”. Now, being that I’m almost 30 and know a lot more about the weird/irrational language that women speak than I did 7 years ago, “maybe we should just take a break” (to her, a woman) probably meant “all I want is for you to reaffirm your love for me”. However, at the time, “maybe we should just take a break” sounded (to me, a man) an awful lot like “maybe we should just take a break”. And seeing as I’d been waiting for an opening like this for days, I readily accepted.
The next 30 minutes or so was a flurry of “Lisa is typing” notifications, quickly followed by 18-line messages that all could have easily just been reduced to one big “OMG WTF WHYYYYYYY?” She did her best to convince me I was making a mistake, but I stood my ground.
And damn son, am I glad I did. In the six months that followed, Lisa would hack into my email twice, send me 18-page novellas on what a tyrant I was, and leave three-minute voicemails on my phone that were just her making up new curse words/trying to simultaneously break the sound barrier. In no way did she make the breakup easy, but in the end it was totally worth it.
Addition by subtraction.
Case Study #3: One of the first jobs I had when I moved to Philly was as a manager of the City non-emergency call center. As a bushy-tailed 25-year-old with very little experience managing people and even less municipal acumen, I was naturally forced to do like seven people’s jobs, work long hours, and try to coerce 60 people who were twice my age into doing the job they were hired to do.
A lot of my staff was really cool, even if they weren’t hard workers, so I can’t say life was that bad. However, as is probably the case with most workplaces, we had one dude that just wouldn’t fucking fall in line. His name was Stacy, and he was 60 years old, about 5’4, and had an out of control salt and pepper goatee. Stacy spent about half of every day walking up and down the aisles of cubicles, flirting with disgusted women and asking his supervisors dumbass questions. The other half was spent taking like a billion 15-minute breaks, wherein he’d either take smelly dumps in the communal bathroom (capacity:1, square footage: about 4) or get into heated cell phone arguments with his girlfriend. In the 9 months or so that I worked there, the higher-ups held several meetings to reshuffle their team members. Every one was like a Turkish bazaar, wherein each supervisor’s singular goal was to NOT get Stacy.
Because not only was Stacy a lazy fuck, he was also a logistical nightmare. It seemed like every week we were adding to his disciplinary file (already a multi-volume monstrosity that had carried over from his last City position). Whether it was showing up in Spiderman tracksuits and calling it business casual (“don’t this look casual, baby??”) or spilling his 7-11 big gulp of Kool-Aid all over his workstation, Stacy spent more time pounding the organization in the ass than he ever did taking calls.
As I hear it, the call center eventually piled up enough dirt on Stacy to can him. It took awhile (mainly because firing a unionized City employee is about as easy as marching into the White House with a potato gun), but they got it done in the end. From the way my old co-workers tell it, the place immediately started running smooth. Without Stacy around to give customers wrong information/take naps in the bathroom/sexually harass the cleaning lady, tensions eased up and work actually started to get done. All’s well that ends well, and rumor has it that Stacy is now driving handsome cabs at Independance Hall.
Addition by subtraction.
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The Stubbs trade, for me, was all about addition by subtraction. It was about removing the black hole from a batting order that otherwise is pretty potent. As much as I loved him in an “Ah shucks, he and Jay Bruce and Joey Votto and Chris Heisey seem like such good buddies” kind of way, his production has only gone down over the last 3+ years. Plus, the organization has been handcuffed by the “he’s a first round pick so we are obligated to wait for his talent to blossom” mentality, and only booting him from the roster entirely could rescue us from that.
So...there’s that. And honestly, that’s enough for me. However, trading for Choo brings a wealth of other positives...
1. He solves the leadoff problem. This one’s the most obvious, and possibly just as important as kissing Stubbs goodbye. The Reds were absolutely woeful out of the leadoff spot last season, and Choo (when batting first) hit .310. He also got on base almost 40% of the time out of that spot, which improves on whatever the Reds were able to cobble together by light years.
2. The lineup becomes “Dusty-proofed”. I can’t take credit for that phrase, as it was tweeted by a Cincy sports writer shortly after the trade was made, but it is so, so true. Dusty Baker loves to tinker with his lineup. If he doesn’t have a super-obvious option for a particular spot (see: Votto, Joey; three-hole), he’ll dick around with it for weeks, leaving the team out of sorts and confused. Then he’ll generally settle on “fast guy at lead-off, shortstop at two-hole, catcher batting eighth” and call it a season, paying very little attention to numbers/common sense/what his eyes see. There is absolutely zero doubt that Choo was obtained so he can lead off, so lead off he will. After that, things will most likely fall into place to the tune of Phillips/Votto/Ludwick/Bruce/Frazier/Cozart/Catcher (because Dusty needs to maintain at least some level of control.)
3. We gave up exactly jack. Besides losing Stubbs, which is kind of like American Idol losing Kara Deoguardi (aka Fartface McGhee), the Reds gave up almost nothing. Didi Gregorious, the guy we sent to Cleveland (who they eventually sent to Arizona) isn’t a bad player. In fact, all reports are that he is a sterling defenseman and will, at some point, be Major League ready. However, we’ve got Zack Cozart manning the position for the next _____ years, so Gregorious was a luxury. No top prospects were moved, and all our young pitching remains. Bullseye, boys. Bullseye.
* * *
Time will tell how the Choo trade will affect the Reds chances in 2013. His contract structure says he’s only here for one year (probably), and it’s hard to know if that will be a productive year or not. However, what we do know is that Shin-Soo Choo is a far better player than Drew Stubbs. We also know that Stubbs has shown almost zero signs of improvement. And, we know that Choo happens to be my buddy Pickford’s “number-one favorite South Korean baseball player of all time (sic)”, which, at this point, seems like a pretty good deal. And who knows, maybe he’ll be so successful in Cincinnati that his countrymen will rise up and unseat that pesky Kim Jong Un once and for all.
Addition by subtraction.
Reed Domer-Shank
JOURNEYMEN Creator and Supreme Leader
In March of my senior year of college, two of my classmates and I decided to take a trip.
We’d already done the Spring Break thing several times, so we weren’t looking to hit Cancun (or really any other place where coeds spend seven days peeing in pools and punching each other in the head).
And, being that both of my classmates happened to be female (Joelle and Cara, for your reference), nothing that would appear obvious to a group of three dudes (Spring Training, NCAA tourney, strip club bender) seemed to engender a consensus.
Still, we had a week off and nothing to do, so it seemed like we should probably at least venture out of our studio apartments.
Eventually, we decided on Tulsa. It was far enough away that it felt like a vacation, and one of my best friends (Nate) had migrated there for law school (go Golden Hurricane!) and convinced me it’d be fun. And, to make the decision easier, another of Nate and my friends (Chunt) was game for tagging along as well. Chunt lived in Lexington at the time, so our plan was to leave Tuesday morning, drive the nine hours to Kentucky, then head to Tulsa in the AM.
Simple enough.
I won’t waste much time describing the first day. The car ride came and went uneventfully, and my companions and I arrived to Lexington in time to spend a fun night out on the town with Chunt. Everything, to that point, was going according to plan.
Then, as they say, shit started going down.
Instead of piling into Joelle’s Corolla the next morning, Chunt insisted that we take his car, which he’d assured me the night before would be much roomier and more comfortable for the ladies in the backseat. As it turned out, the “car” in question turned out to be a Pontiac Aztec.
For those of you who don’t know, the Aztec is basically a cross between an SUV and a Triceratops. It’s big, weirdly shaped, and gets worse gas mileage than a parade float. However, Chunt had borrowed it from his grandmother specifically for this occasion, and the last thing I wanted on my vacation was to give an old woman a figurative slap to the face. So I just kind of went with it.
Initially, everything seemed to be going well. Chunt and the ladies had gotten along well the night before, so our first hour or two on the road consisted of him telling inappropriate jokes and the girls giggling.
We were about two hours in, then, when Cara mentioned that she was hungry.
Now, I won’t say Cara was fat. She wasn’t. But at the same time, no one was confusing her with Molly Sims either, if you know what I’m saying. She was a big-boned girl. The fluffy type. Also, she was from Jersey, and anyone who knows anything about Jersey girls knows that it’s best not to piss them off. They’ll gouge out your eyes and then eat a meatball hoagie right in front of you. It’s scary.
That’s why, when about 30 miles of lonely Indiana highway went by with no food in sight, I started to get worried. Chunt was jabbering away behind the wheel (probably about UK basketball or Eastbound and Down or that time he got a royal flush), completely oblivious to the fact that Cara was quickly going from Smegal to Gollum in the backseat. Luckily, as we chugged around a bend, I spotted an exit with a gas station.
Being that we were in southern Indiana, this wasn’t exactly a BP superstore. It was more like one of those dusty filling stations with one old pump that you see in horror movies, where the toothless guy sits out front in overalls and cackles when you tell him you’re “a little lost.” Still, by that time all of us were pretty hungry, so we made do with old packs of hostess donuts and weird drinks and the foil-wrapped breakfast sandwiches that had waved goodbye to lukewarm two hours ago. Everyone foraged around the place and got what they needed, and then we saddled back up.
What happened next would basically change my life forever.
We were only back on the road for about 15 minutes when Chunt and I saw a sign for Wendy’s. The girls spotted it too, and the four of us had a solid three-to-four-second laugh about how ironic it was that we ate gas station cat-meat sandwiches instead of waiting an extra 15 minutes for a delicious Frosty. However, Chunt proceeded to cruise past the exit, and what was once a car full of laughs immediately morphed into a snake-pit of rage.
If my memory serves me correctly, Cara’s first words were “What the FUCK did you just do?”, and they sounded like they’d been shot out of a cannon. Right away, I recognized our mistake. The donuts and the Sunny D and the makeshift McMuffins weren’t enough. They were something, but they weren’t breakfast. At least to her they weren’t.
I shit you not when I say that Chunt and Cara spent the next five to ten minutes shouting at eachother at the top of their lungs. And anyone who’s ever been in a car with two screaming adults will appreciate that these were easily the longest moments of my life. Chunt’s core argument was similar to what yours or mine or any other rational human beings would have been. Basically, “YOU JUST FUCKING ATE.” Cara’s, on the other hand, was a mixture of “You did that on purpose!” and “You know that gas station food was stale!” and “NOM NOM NOM NOM GGRAHRAHHHHHH.”
As the mutual friend between the two, I was stuck making excuses for both of them and trying to suppress my laughter when Chunt would say things like “Why don’t you fuckin’ WALK to Idaho??” in his thick Kentucky accent (he thought Tulsa was in Idaho), or when Cara would respond by calling him a schoolboy bitch. Joelle, meanwhile, cowered in the corner of the backseat, pretending she was listening to her iPod (which, in reality, was probably as effective as trying to hold a conversation in the midst of a tornado).
After awhile, the verbal melee died down. Cara had retreated to silent, simmering fury in the backseat, content to glare a hole through the back of Chunt’s head. Chunt, on the other hand, had only needed about three minutes of silence to return to his usual jovial self. He and I spent the next hour or so listening to the radio and joking around and basically trying to forget that Hiroshima had just happened in our backseat. As we cruised through Indiana and into Illinois, a light snow began to fall, and the pastoral scene seemed to be just what the situation called for. Things were looking up.
Then, of course, the fucking Aztec broke.
That’s right, we were cruising along at a healthy speed when, suddenly, the spaceship on wheels began to sputter. Before I realized what was happening, Chunt was pulling over to the side of the road, allowing us to coast slowly down an off ramp that had seemed to materialize out of nowhere. We came to a depressing halt on the side of the road, and I gave Chunt the universal “explain to me what the F just happened” stare.
He slammed his hands on the steering wheel and said “This motherfucker just ran out of gas!”, as if our Aztec had spontaneously just decided to screw us.
This, of course, caused Cara to again unleash the banshee. She immediately launched into another tongue-lashing, employing F-words and B-words and even some C-words faster than a fuming Chunt could come up with retorts. Sensing the onset of World War IV, Joelle and I popped open our doors and exited to the grassy area next to the off-ramp. She mumbled something about needing a cigarette and walked away, and I took a few minutes to call Nate and warn him about the hurricane of shit that was headed his way.
A few seconds later, Chunt got out of the car, slammed his door, and started walking down the ramp toward civilization, only to return about 45 minutes later carrying one of those huge red gas cans. From that point forward, no one really said anything. No apologies from Chunt for not keeping tabs on the gas level (or for insisting we drive to tulsa in the MIllenium Falcon). And certainly no thank-you’s from Cara after her new sworn enemy had just spent almost an hour walking through the snow to find a gas station. After hitting the gas station to fully fuel up and driving through a fast food joint for lunch (Wendy’s, ironically), we set forth again on a trip that exactly zero of us were any longer excited for.
An hour passed. Two. We drove for miles and miles, Chunt and I talking about nothing in particular and the girls consumed by their iPods. The tension in the car had lessened, but barely.
That’s when I made a decision that....well...I probably shouldn’t have made.
I’d been feeling like I had to pee for awhile. 30 minutes, maybe 45. And we all know that once you realize you have to pee, you never forget. It’s not like the feeling of having to poop, which can come and go sporadically, leaving us frustrated and confused. When you have to pee, the feeling steadily builds, until it’s not so much a nuisance as it is a heightening throb in your abdomen that eventually scales the wall of your rib cage and holds your whole body hostage.
That’s the point I was at.
Unfortunately, we were way behind schedule. With multiple food and gas stops and an hour layover at exit 322, we were already going to be hard-pressed to get to Tulsa in time to partake in the Tupac-themed Power Hour that Nate had planned for us. So, I decided to bite the bullet and just go.
Now, most of you are probably assuming that that means I proceeded to urinate in my pants. I did not. Instead, I took a straw poll of the team to see who would care if I just kind of turned around and peed into a bottle. A seemingly harmless maneuver that would ensure we didn’t lose any more valuable road time.
At first the girls resisted, as was expected. I’m pretty sure every girl in the history of mankind has been programmed to at least initially object when a guy wants to whip out his thing. However, I wasn’t the only one in the car who was badly in need of alcohol (plus everyone else was pretty jazzed about the Tupac thing too), so all it really took was some gentle cajoling and a few off-color jokes for the ladies to start laughing in spite of themselves.
Pretty quickly, we came up with what seemed like a foolproof plan. Joelle would hold up a blanket that would act as a divider between the front and the back, while simultaneously closing her eyes. Cara would also close her eyes, and also yell “LALALALALALALALALA” for as long as it took me to complete my mission. I would do what I had to do as quickly as possible, and Chunt would do his best not to swerve or hit any bumps for fear of returning a pee-stained car to his Grandma. And finally, we all decided it would be best to open our windows. Yes, it was cold, but interim coldness is always better than being trapped in a confined space that smells like fresh hot urine.
Unfortunately, there was one issue. Every single bottle that we had had been discarded at the last gas station, so all we had were Wendy’s cups. Luckily, we had all gotten Biggie sized drinks (which, thinking back, might have contributed to me feeling like I had to pee a river), so I assured everyone that it would be fine and I could personally guarantee no overflow/spillage.
So, I started to go. And I kept going. And going. Inch by inch, the cup began to fill. And as the liquid level began nearing the top, I began to panic. See, this wasn’t like a plastic tumbler or a water bottle or something else that could really stand the test of time. This was a thin, paper Wendy’s cup that had already served its purpose hours ago, and was now being highly compromised by a foreign substance. I could see the thing getting close to the top now, and I could feel it wobble slightly in my hand, just as you would expect a thin paper cup to wobble when it’s full of a warm substance that was never meant to be it in the first place. Additionally, it didn’t help that Chunt kept looking over at me in a clear state of alarm. He knew just as well as I did that sometimes these things don’t go as planned. Sometimes, like in Dumb and Dumber, you just keep going and going and going and you can’t stop once you’ve started, because it stings.
By the grace of God, I was able to finish right as the bubbly golden liquid reached the top. Unfortunately, by this time the cup had almost completely broken down in my hand, and was wobbling like crazy. I only had one hand, so I couldn’t zip up without possibly scissoring my boys, and after a frantic scan of the front console, I didn’t see the cup top anywhere. The whole situation seemed to be coming apart in front of my eyes, so I chose what seemed to be the only viable option at the time. With a flick of my wrist, I tossed that bitch out the window.
Now, I don’t pretend to know much about physics. In fact, I somehow managed to not ever take a physics course in high school or college. So perhaps that’s why I didn’t realize at first what I’d just done. Until, of course, I heard the screams.
I’ll never forget what I saw when I turned around. The image will forever be seared into my memory.
Joelle had dropped the blanket. She and Cara sat there, blinking, their faces locked in the same confused/horrified stare. Right then, a beam of sunlight shone through the back window and it hit me. They were literally covered in pee.
Not only were their faces glistening with what may as well have been liquid death, but it seemed like the whole backseat had assisted in absorbing the blow. Both girls’ pillows, conveniently located on their laps, were soaked. Joelle’s iPod sat in a puddle on her lap. Everything seemed to be dotted with dark, wet stains.
But their faces were the worst. Joelle, having been the one that sat directly behind me, had taken the brunt. Her hair was matted down in spots, and urine literally slid down her cheeks as she stared at me in disbelief. I’ll never be able to confirm this, but I’m almost positive she damn near cracked a smile. One of those “this is the most unbelievably ridiculous thing I’ve ever experienced” type of smiles.
Cara, on the other hand, was not smiling. She just sat there frozen, like the White Witch of Narnia had turned her into stone. The wind howled through the open windows as I tried to stammer my way through an apology, but there was nothing I could say. The damage had been done. Here was my friend, a girl who was so miserable already that she’d spent the afternoon researching flights out of Tulsa on her phone, and I’d literally just poured a half gallon of pee on her head. All she could do was stare at me, her mouth open in shock, the remnants of my relief session clinging to the tip of her nose.
For a few long moments, all we heard was the wind. Then, softly and so that only I could hear, Chunt began to laugh.
* * *
Understandably, that was the darkest moment of the trip. Oh sure, we hit a few more snags before reaching our destination (the first rest stop we arrived at to “wash up” didn’t have running water; we got a fucking flat tire within two miles of Nate’s house), but that moment, where the two girls sat deflated and helpless in the backseat, covered in human waste, well.. I’ll never forget it.
We’d eventually arrive in Tulsa and go our separate ways. Joelle knew a friend in nearby Oklahoma City who was kind enough to pick them up, and upon much introspection, both girls decided to take flights back to Lexington. Cara because she couldn’t stand the thought of being trapped in a car with Chunt, and Joelle because she didn’t want to ditch Cara.
All in all, it was unequivocally the worst road trip I’ve ever experienced, and for me, it puts this year’s JDL in a bit of perspective (ah yes, the inevitable tie-in to fantasy football).
Like our trip to Tulsa, my first season as a Commish in the JDL has been mostly miserable. There have been several managers who have ruled from the front seat the whole way, and then there’s been the rest of us cramped in the back. Hungry, cold, and constantly in danger of getting peed on.
However, the playoffs start this weekend, so it’s kind of like we’ve arrived at our destination. Everyone is clean, dry, and ready for a new beginning. And whether that means getting crushed over cheap beer and one-minute Tupac jams, or heading out to OKC to shop, everyone will eventually follow their own path toward what they hope is a happy ending.
This week features two tight matchups in Jake versus Tim and myself versus Spaz. Tune in next week to see which teams will forge ahead to face Elise and Chunt (yes, THAT Chunt) with Conference championships on the line.
Soon enough this miserable season will be over for all of us. Until then, make sure to buckle up and, for your own sake, roll up those windows.
Reed Domer-Shank
JDL Chief of Operations and Golden Shower Aficionado
