My Friends

I live out in Valley Stream, Long Island. I’ve met quite a few interesting characters since I moved out here. Back in High School, a few years ago, I had decided to attend school out in Valley Stream and stay going to school in Queens. A bunch of my buddies out in Valley Stream made me partially regret not staying out on Long Island for school, imagine the fun I would have had. But I left things the way they were, I found comfort in familiarity, and I stayed at Academy in Queens.
One of my friends in Valley Stream has interesting name, to say the least. What his parents actually named him had us laughing every time someone tried to beat the dead horse dead and make a joke about Charles’ name. You see, Charles would almost always be called Chuck. His middle name, Anthony, would usually be shortened to a simple; “A” for joke purposes and his last name was, unfortunately, Weiner.
We would constantly joke about Chuck’s dad sitting in his shed, laughing through the smoke as he finally realized he named his kid Chuck A. Weiner.
One thing I knew was inevitable once I realized I was keeping two, very different, circles of friends was that eventually, like a Venn diagram with ridiculousness on one side and shenanigans on the other, my two circles would overlap. It came sooner than I though because in 10th grade James, a friend of mine from Woodhaven, Queens decided to come out and stay at my house for a few nights.
We decided one night to go out and do something. We would hang out at Kelvin’s house, one of my Valley Stream friends, until nighttime drinking up his older brothers beers. Nothing says, “welcome to suburbia” quite like underage drinking. James had brought some fireworks up from Pennsylvania so we knew we were having a fun night.
When it got dark we went off to the local elementary school to dump the bottles and set off some fireworks. James, Kalvin and I on our skateboards and Chuck and Ted followed on their bikes.
When we got to the schoolyard, Kalvin immediately blurted out, “I have to take a shit.” I saw the light go off right above James’s head as soon as I realized he had a backpack full of fireworks. His wonderful idea involved hiding behind the handball court wall (to give Kalvin his privacy, of course) he would then insert a few rockets into a pile of Kalvin’s poop and hide behind the wall again. We did it and as the wall was splattered with fresh feces, laughed our collective asses off.
We were about to light off a few more bottle rockets when we all had another collective “Jackass” moment. We would light a bottle rocket from the crack of someone’s butt. Chuck had too much back fat so he was out, James wanted to do the lighting, Ted had to go home soon (his parents were like that) and Kalvin didn’t want to do it so it was up to me. Not once did anyone realize that it might have been a bad idea, until of course I felt sparks singing my backside and heard a loud whistle shoot up past the back of my head.
We got it on film. It ended up on YouTube. And my back hair was singed for a week. This is what happens when your like-minded best buddies meet.