The Big Payoff

I am sitting on a veritable treasure-trove of wealth.

But Rob, you are saying, your vast and unprecedented knowledge of movie trivia, while interesting, has proven overly useless since the dawn of time.

Ha! Time will tell on that, you cretin.

And yours will be the first hide nailed to the wall when the revolution comes!

Mark my words.

But, I was referring not to my much-lauded general store of movie information. No, no, no. I was referring, instead, to my rather esoteric collection of fantasy novels, some of which, I have come to find out, are worth rather substantially more then when I bought them years back.

My fascination with the fantasy genre (and we're talking swords and sorcery here, not the other kind of fantasy) began at an early age as one of my first books was about three trees who could talk. It was called The Three Talking Trees.

I told you, this was at an early age.

Some people.

Anyhow, it was fantasy at its finest and the author even signed the book for me. Each tree, it seemed, wanted to be part of something great when they were cut down (trees that want to be cut down . . . someone should call the EPA). Each was greatly disturbed when they were used for much more humble means. The nice part of the story is when we find out that each of them was used, at one point, by Jesus, and helped him in his work.

Did I mention the story was written by a priest?

This is the same man who thought I was a simply wonderful child by virtue of my name. "Let the boy run around, Rosemary," he told my much-chagrined mother at church as I ran screaming all around and making a general nuisance of myself.

Ahh, what good times those were.

And only last week.

Now, though, my days of being entertained by simple talking tree stories have past. One year I was given, as a present The Hobbit. You may have heard something about a little film-adaptation that was released last month by the same author: The Lord of the Rings.

It wasn't a big success, as far as I know, and it was a limited release.

I'm very excited, as I understand that in the second movie there will be talking trees. That little "sequel" changed everything for me. Mostly because I wanted One Ring to rule them all . . . and soon I shall have my way.

Muhahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

Sorry.

Many was the night that I stayed up late reading, only to fall asleep with my finger breaking the spine of my books. After I finished The Lord of the Rings, I read just about anything I could get my greasy little hands on from the fantasy section of the book store. Any money I had went to the purchase of more books and also the occasional double-double chocolate-chip cookie from Parson's Bakery.

They were the size of your head.

Hey, I was a growing boy!

I became every parent's nightmare. I mean really, if you are a reader, a book-worm if you will, it just means you are destined for more expensive past-times like college, disillusionment and probably the writing of really, really bad poetry.

Trust me, I make Jim Morrison look like William Wordsworth.

Ok, no one could do that.

But I at least make him look like Coleridge.

But just because I am a bad writer, doesn't mean that I don't stumble upon a great work, purchase that work, and proceed to dog-ear the pages and scratch up the cover. Yeah, I'm a real collector.

How do I know this, you ask?

Well, as I was looking for some copies of a series of stories that I had read once upon a time in junior high (yes, I actually went to junior high . . . we won't discuss if I made it through, however), I found that one of the volumes was out of print. Fortunately, you can purchase an older copy of this story starting at $165.

Let me repeat that, just so you get the full effect.

The soft-cover, trade paperback that's been kicking around my library (since "pile of books" isn't nearly as romantic an image), for the past fifteen years or so that I shelled out $3.95 for, is now worth forty-one times what I paid.

That's a return on investment that would ease a smile across most Wall Streeters faces much like an oil slick spreading from the ruined hulk of a ship that just beached itself on a well-known and marked coral reef.

What's better is that I have hundreds of these esoteric and unknown little ditties sitting in a basement somewhere just waiting for the Great Flood that will end their usefulness as the product of some poor writer's life.

So let me just be the first to say, "Shall we start the bidding at $10,000?"

You may feel free to contact me if you wish to make a silent bid.

My Armpit of America

Standing in sub-zero weather watching small-town America stream by in all its glory along with about two hundred thousand lights by way of decoration is not usually how I describe a good time. For me a good time usually involves a call around 1 a.m. by an unbelievably attractive woman.

Usually she’s drunk.

She has the wrong number and hangs up quickly.

Hey, I’m defining a good time here, not you.

Be that as it may, not only was I standing in sub-zero weather, the cold biting at my nose, fingers, ears and other unmentionables that will certainly impact my ability to have children in the future, but I had drug my parents, Robert and Rosemary, from their warm home, traditional Christmas decorating and spiked Silk Nog (Egg Nog for the health conscious).

My parents are real troopers.

On top of that, apparently the entire town of Helper, Utah, was also present for this debacle in the cold. This amounted to people on floats waving at their friends and family on the street.

Wait, did I say cold?

I’m sorry, that’s not quite fair. It was damn cold.

Damn, damn cold.

It was the kind of cold that deserves at least an exclamation point, if not an entire forest of them. Unfortunately, my fingers are still thawing and thus brittle. I am unable to stretch my left hand in order to reach the shift key and the exclamation point at the same time.

Things will shatter painfully.

I definitely have plans for that hand later on in life as well. It’s one of my favorite hands.

But amid all my complaining about my feet being cold, the hot chocolate my father bought being too hot, the lights being too bright and the street being too hard, I had a sudden sense of deja vu all over again.

It was like I had done this before some time in my past.

Or my future.

It was anyone’s call.

Then it hit me like a two-ton . . . heavy thing. An old friend of mine, Rick, who has a strange obsession with chipmunks and dilithium, had sent me an article from the Washington Post in which they named Battle Mountain, Nevada the “Armpit of America”.

I kid you not.

They actually paid a guy to go across America to find the absolute armpit and then gave it all the “rights and privileges thereof”. (You can read the article here if you like: http://www/washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31628-2001Nov28.html) Where do I sign up for this job?!

Why should that flash in my head like a Mark IV photon torpedo? Well, in this case we are going to have Sherman set the Way-Back machine for the late 1980s. A time when Guns ‘n Roses had just released their epic album Lies, there was turmoil in Kuwait, and a young Andy Garcia taught us to laugh.

These would be the years that I spent in the “Armpit of America”.

And standing in small town USA, while the parade jerked, stalled and eventually sloughed past via mitosis (bonus points if you can name all five phases), I could feel the ever-present wind of a dirty mining town, the taste of grit from the desert and the tangy smell of rotten sagebrush.

None of these are good things.

Battle Mountain is the land that time forgot. It has the ability to suck your will to live.

I started trying to figure out if I had any good memories from Battle Mountain. It was a lot like trying to teach geometry to a brick. You know the brick has the basic principles, but neither of you has the capacity to demonstrate success.

Then I went back to the source of the article on Battle Mountain: my friend Rick.

That’s when the memories came flooding back in. It was something akin to the emotional state of the citizens of Pompeii upon finding out they were going to become a major archeological site. I found myself huddled in a little ball in the corner of a closet rocking back and forth and chanting a mantra against evil.

It took the paramedics from one of the floats forty-five minutes and a handful of Valium to coax me out of the corner.

It took several shots of rum (read as re-distilled Everclear), a few hits of heroine and some reasonably strong crack before I was able to start writing this morning.

You see, “back in the day” I wasn’t the only misfit at Battle Mountain High School (proud home of the Longhorns). Hell no. As with every other high school in the world, there’s always that fringe group. In some cases these misfits band together for mutual protection against stronger factions.

That’s how we got Republicans.

But that wasn't us.

We called ourselves, and I kid you not, the Four A**holes of Battle Mountain. It seems an appropriate title, since almost everyone else thought of us in similar terms. Even our parents considered us trouble on tires (though they were all bald tires). Ok, my parents considered us trouble, but in a town that has no movie theater, roller-rink, bowling alley, not a single luxury, what else was there?

I mean it was like Robinson Crusoe woke up with a hangover after being run-over by an International and then finding out from his answering machine that the woman he loved just moved to L.A. to pursue her doctorate.

Basically, it sucked.

So it was Rick, Eddie, Skeeter and I.

There were others that we hung out with to be sure; the Marlatt brothers (twin long-haired hippy types) Becca, Leah, Kevin, Brett, Kim and a slew of others whose names I forget (mostly on purposes). But for daily action at school and weekend fun, there was always, and only, the four of us.

We pretty much had to make our own fun, and that didn't include cow-tipping (which is impossible to do without a forklift), and that usually consisted of mocking everyone else in town and talking of leaving; well, fleeing really, screaming as we ran. We also did obscure things that in retrospect don't seem like that much fun. Knocking over all the safety cones on Main Street during the re-construction, or taking odd article like gloves and canned goods and placing them in the freezers at Lamaire's General Store (that one we got kicked out for).

For Rick's 18th birthday we decided to all get drunk (don't a lot of tragedies start out like that?!). Our parents actually knew, because that was part of the deal, and Rick's parents took our keys in exchange for the alcohol (mostly wine-coolers that to this day I still can't drink). I distinctly remember Rick's dad pouring us shots of a noxious fluid and complaining when I was passed over. Sometime around 10 pm I kicked Rick out of his bed and passed out.

Hey, we were young, all right!?

Now, I don't pass out until at least 10:30.

Well, we're all a lot older now, and I haven't seen any of these guys since Eddie's wedding sometime in 1993. Skeeter is a teacher (God help those kids), Eddie is involved in PR in some capacity (God help that company) and Rick will shortly be a doctor (God help . . . well, you get the idea).

But that doesn't mean I have forgotten how we all helped each other survive both the insanity of high school and the utter vapid-ness of Battle Mountain, the undisputed Armpit of America.

We laughed, we cried, it became a part of us, and we'll never back.

Here's to you lads.