Chaper 1.3

Chapter 1.3

JMH Meets

Now, where I met Matt. It was during one of these lunch survival sessions where I met my brother. I was sitting down on the comfortable, hard, no back wooden bleachers when a voice chimed soothingly like that of my grandmother’s grandfather clock.

“Hey. Can I have a grape?” That was the first words Matt ever said to me. I turned to look and saw him for the first time. I knew a good thing when I saw it, an actual conversation with some other being besides my twin sister, a kid with a huge balding spot on the back of his head (which I will have remain nameless), a student who jabbered in such an intelligible voice that it sounded as if he was not speaking a lick of the English language though he was (he too shall remain nameless, though I found out surprisingly that he ended up becoming a science professor at a community college years later. How his students understood him I will never know!).

Matt was a young man of taller stature than me at that time. He stood almost five feet eight and weighed about 130 pounds. What stood for me about Matt was his mustache. As a freshman, myself included, there was a lack of facial hair in existence. Matt was not lacking in the area of facial hair. He had what some people call the “dirty Mexican” mustache. It was a thick one too.

“Sure.” I responded holding out my hand that held the grapes residing in the small zip lock bag. I was one of the few that brought my lunch to school. The first couple of days I brought it in some sort of theme style lunch box. To my dismay, I saw that I was the only one who was dumb and childish enough to do such a thing, save for my twin sister, but she does not count because she comes from the same moronic family. I then decided to switch to the small disposal brown paper sacks to hide my lunch. It was still childish and geekish to bring my lunch to school since all of the “cool” kids used the advantage to our high school’s open campus rule and headed to the local grocery store or gas station (which by the way did not sell gas of any kind…just sugar coated goodies and the illegal sale of cigarettes to underage teens). I did not, however, become part of this Kooldom until later on in my high school years.

After Matt had munched upon a few grapes, we began to talk about ourselves, our families, and where we had come from. Matt was a pretty straight forward guy to talk to. It was during these discussions that we finally got to the conversation that each other was waiting to be brought up, but did not have the guts to ask, say, or discuss first. The idea of a Bathroom Buddy.

Matt was mine. Now, I know the title of Bathroom Buddy sounds sick in a weird sort of way, but it actually was a key to survival during my freshman year. We would go to the bathroom at lunch at the same time. This way, we would have each other’s back in case of some sort of incident would occur, such as my trash can stage earlier on. I am happy to announce that our system was a success and neither one of us were trashed, humiliated, or harmed in any way during the rest of our freshman high school year. Little did I know that the Bathroom Buddy of mine would grow to become something larger on a grander scale!