I want to take a little time to tell you about a couple of friends who were important parts of my life during my late teenage years. I haven’t seen either of these men in a long time now, and I have to admit it makes me a bit sad.

There was a guy I knew for quite some time, a friend of mine once upon a time, who liked to pretend that he was some sort of spiritual sherpa, styling himself as a pagan of some nebulous variety. This was a man who took himself far too seriously for being little more than a sexual predator masking his predation behind a transparent facade of offering spiritual guidance to vulnerable and naive younger girls. I liked to compare him unfavorably to something more like a poor man’s Rasputin than anything else.

This was a man who assembled a flock of teenagers around him in his 30s…and I derived endless pleasure from fucking with his mojo wherever the opportunity could be found. I’ve always been kind of a prick like that, but it does help to show you that it isn’t just those of a Judeo-Christian faith that I enjoy tormenting and mocking for no other reason than the sheer pleasure I discover in doing so. I spent a good deal of time toying with his insipid little playthings as well, though I tended to display a touch more reservation where they were concerned because I genuinely felt kind of bad for them while simultaneously thinking they were all functionally retarded.

Thankfully I had another friend around that same time who was equally inclined towards socially inappropriate behavior and poor impulse control. There was one time when he and I happened to find the decaying head of a deer in a dumpster while visiting the fast food joint where one of our mutual friends was working, as the manager who almost exclusively deserves the credit for running it right down the toilet. This friend of mine and I were immediately on the same page as we hoisted the head from the dumpster and placed it in the back of his truck.

The head of that deer was placed with care, as threateningly as possible, inside the front door of our self-styled guru’s apartment simply because he had the poor common sense required to leave his door unlocked in case anyone happened to come by…that was a habit he quickly curbed thanks to us. That evening we stopped by again and found the deer staring up at us from the garbage can behind the apartment and we promptly extricated it and placed it on the rail of the deck behind the apartment so that it would be staring right at our friend when he stepped outside to smoke. What was done with the bit of carcass after that was unknown to us, all that could be said is that we never tracked it down after using it that second time.

The number of times that we tampered with this friend’s “altar” are probably beyond measure, individually and together. Frequently it was something as simple as moving things around in subtle ways when he wasn’t home while other times it was more invasive actions such as passing amounts of urine into various oils and “potions” that he had crafted and utilized for assorted purposes…there might have been some semen as well, also there was feces.

Those were good times in my life, and I realize just how awful all of that makes me sound…but I do peculiar things when I get bored.

That partner in crime was a terrible person for me to be around, and I totally concur with that assessment. Not only was he the sort of person who encouraged me to not bother holding myself back where aberrant impulses were concerned, but he was almost aggressively averse to behaving like a sane human being himself.

He and I developed a game once (one that we continued to play for quite some time) while bored and driving around aimlessly, and it should be mentioned that we were also quite high…probably from drugs that we had skimmed from what we were selling to Job Corps students at the time. The game became known as Next Blue Car, we weren’t terribly creative about it, so shut up. The objective was simple; drive aimlessly until you encounter a blue car of any kind, follow this car until you happen across another blue car, and begin following that car…repeat. Two caveats of the game were what made it a more truly antisocial activity; the first one is that you do whatever you have to in order to follow said blue car (including rapid, illegal U-turns and excessive speed in order to remain less than a car length from the target) and the other rule being that if the car pulls into a driveway or a garage you are to park directly in front of the house or in said driveway with the engine running until either another blue car comes along or an hour has passed, casually ignoring anyone who might confront you for being there. These additional elements were what had the capacity to make our game honestly quite terrifying to the occupants of the blue car in question. This became our default form of entertainment when nothing else was holding our attention sufficiently.

We purchased blow guns once along with a healthy surplus of different varieties of darts for them and developed a habit of routinely surprising one another by firing darts at each other whenever the urge was upon us, typically when it was least expected (occasionally while the victim was asleep or even mid coitus). There were also extended intervals of time during which we had blow gun wars with one another, no protective eye wear or clothing included. The blow guns were nothing, however, compared to the time when we procured a couple of hatchets from the tool shed in a stranger’s yard and proceeded to attack each other with little by way of restraint. This was certainly a high point in my life as far as decadence exceeding common sense and self-preservation is concerned. Surprisingly enough, neither of us was seriously injured.

In all the time I spent with this particular friend there was only one time he was ever angry with me. This was a time when we were parked along the side of a highway, I can’t recall why, but there were a bunch of us there, in a couple of vehicles…maybe someone needed to change a tire and we all stopped together. His daughter (who couldn’t have been more than four years old at the time) was being a pest and I casually told her to go and play closer to the road. He might have been less upset with me if she hadn’t listened to me. I think he might have actually hit me if it weren’t for the fact that he recognized as well as I did how that would have played out, and how rapidly the whole thing would have spiraled out of control.

I haven’t seen him in years, more than a decade in fact, and I openly admit that I miss him a great deal. I have no idea where his life has taken him…but I would be far from surprised if I were to learn that he was no longer with us, though I suspect that he would say the same thing about me if asked.