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.