That is short for Uncle Maximum. As in being the one in our
clique who had the questionably macho ability to hold the maximum amount of
whatever kind of substance we were passing around in his system. Later on those
limits were tested and said substances would generally find their way out of
him. Yard, toilet, dashboard, where ever he was he shared. Never mind that. He
is my oldest and best friend. A great husband, a loving dad, a dutiful son.
And, thanks to a solid disposition, still alive. Thank the gods.
I got to know DB back in J high. He had already been toiling
in the fields of catholic school for years, knew the nuns, the whiskey priests
and all the hard cases who had come up before the cross just like him. I joined
up in the 7th grade, fresh out of public elementary and for whatever
reason he took a shine to me. He was pugnacious, wild, funny and, as a balance
to all that, introspective, intelligent and generally quiet as hell. I was his
polar opposite…loud, awkward, bookish, sometimes too much in my head and
completely naive…it’s funny to think but that rare balancing act of being complete
opposites seemed to guarantee our friendship from the start. We tended to hang
with the rest of the geeky guys, the nerdy ones, something that seemed to be
okay as we were all weird, bright, shy around girls and yet always on the make. And while we took our
mischievousness on road fairly often he was always finding ways to up the ante.
A good example is our 9th grade class experience at Disneyland. I am
almost sure that he was the one who came up with the two more elaborate tools
of terror we pulled together for that day: Salvo detergent pods, which were dropped
into the Pirates of the Caribbean flume (and shut down the ride for the rest of
the day) and foot long chrome tubes that were just the perfect size for
chickpeas, which we used with deadly skill and accuracy throughout the day but
most notably on the WED People Movers. Why we didn’t get kicked out of the park
that day will always be one of the great mysteries of life but it had long
lasting power to inspire other equally great acts of stupidity and craziness.
Things just seemed to happen when DB was around, some good,
some not so much. When he brought the homemade nunchucks to school we thought,
okay, a cool tool to make us look very tough. Tough times ended early when he
popped himself in the nose at lunch time and broke it wide open. A good solid
blood flow has a way of ruining a white Catholic school boy’s shirt. We were
always good for a bike ride to the beach but once, when we were surrounded by
some local toughs he and his neighbor pals got away, which left me holding the
bag. In the end turned out okay. I figured out a way to not only let them get
away but to talk myself out of being jumped as well. It paid to live in the
barrio back in those days.
High school, well, we got through it alive. Not hard in a
prep school. We hung out with motor heads, the surfers, the lowriders, the dope
heads. We listened to Tull, Nugent, Aerosmith, Black Sabbath and Skynyrd. We
hustled mota when we could and took in school dances just so we could hang out with
the cool kids. After graduation we took off for a week and camped along the
Kern River and talked our way out of a ticket for having an unattended fire (the
liquor and the dope we had at the site would have been enough to send us to
jail). We talked out way out of a ticket on his birthday, him loaded to gills,
a bag of dope in the glovebox waiting to be found. We shared cousins, a rolling
machine, a number of record albums, a handful of friends, Ren Faire memories
and a lot of cheap Mexican mota.
We worked side by side on the weekends at the
swap meet, picked up trash, double dated girls and shared a lot of stale popcorn
and cold beer afterwards with the field crews we mustered up to handle the
crowds and the busted up left behind treasures. We looked out after each other's lives. I got him to a hospital after he was badly torn up in an off road motorcycle accident. After getting lost in the local mountains I watched him almost plummet to his death when a sun damaged rope ladder behind an abandoned mota farm broke off underneath his feet. We took in camping in the high desert in the winter time where he taught me how to do all those outdoorsman kind of things my old man never taught me to do. And, best of all, I got to be his best man at his wedding (and to this day, the only marriage he has ever had, thank god). I ate the flowers off my lapel, gave a hell of a toast, drank too much bubbly and cried my eyes out. A good friend is a tough thing to lose to a wife!
We both got into drugs but at different times of our lives. DB started early. I can still
remember hearing the stories about the giant acid induced spider that chased him
down the block. In our senior year we had a mutual pal who turned us onto big bags of Mexican shake where we learned to roll bombers together. We did way too many unknown chemicals,
dropped our share of LSD, packed too much Bolivian marching powder up our noses
but it was our mutual love of mota and beer that became our signature drug of choice and our regular source of amusement
and after work pleasure.
When I took off and joined the Navy it didn’t take him too long to join up, too. He was and still is a tough son of a bitch and when he went off to the fleet he wasn’t going to go lightly. He got out of boot camp and went off to be a machinist, but he took it one better and made that working on nuke reactors. Surface ships were not going to be his bag, no sir. He decided to up the macho ante and go submarines. He took up scuba diving, bought himself a Harley and top it off, he invested in his prized “rocket on a roller skate”, a Sunbeam Tiger. We ran into each other now and again, him off of Pt. Loma Blvd, me out of 32nd Street. When he finally got home in the early 80’s we got to know each other again, first up in North Hollywood, then back to Orange County. From 1981 on we managed to launch careers, marriages and families.
Friendship, when you start off that solid, that connected,
never really gets broken, even at a distance. We’ve seen each other maybe a
dozen times these past twenty some odd years. I’ve made my way down south, he
and the missus have made their way up north. Every time we get together it seems
as if we have to commit to burning down the house all over again. One evening fairly recently
I got to visit with his mom, who I hadn’t seen in years. After she left I went
through three bottles of wine, helped him with his beer, all the while watching
him do a large number on a case of local craft brew and a couple medicinal
brownies. We were young Turks again, even if it was just for the evening. The
next day I had to make a nine hour drive back up north. That drive took
fifteen. Rest stops were my salvation. We have never partied like that again.
Yep, we have come a long way from the days where we would
shoot construction tacks into oncoming traffic on the freeway for fun. When we
get together these days our consumption is mellow. We share our California mota
(his preferred strain: Pineapple, mine Hawaiian Sativa) and knock back brews and
bubbly. We are both happy with our lives. He and his wife are both retired and planning
on road trips and adventures to fill up their time. His house is a wonder, his
kids dutiful, a bit wild and making their way in the world. He is recovering
from a work life filled with humping broken diesel engines out of large trucks
and the lines in his face show the wear and tear of a long party fueled life.
And yet he is still the good guy that I got to know years
ago on that Catholic school field. When we talk on the phone the years fall
away. There have been episodes in our lives where stupidity and circumstance
have kept us from seeing each other for years at a time. But once we make that
connection again it’s as if no time has passed at all. I look forward to his
road trips, to him and his good wife finding their way out to the wilds of
Colorado. If not here, well, then, I guess me and my partner will have to make
my way back to Cali to see them, instead. His wife, good woman that she is, has
pretty much forbidden us from breaking out the tec or the Jack Daniels ever
again. Can’t blame her there. The last time we did that we almost got arrested
for drinking in a municipal park, and, if that wasn’t enough, we painted the
walls outside the garage with large splashes of bbq sauce. Yeah, too much fun.
A trademark, a liability, just a way of life that we share with each other.
And yes, we’re grown. We’re wise. And we’re still the best of
buds.
Salud!
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