How to propose.

Step One - get drunk.

To my fellow outlaws, outcasts and misfits,

And so without further ado, away we go…

It was the summer of ‘93 and I had just been kicked out of college. I thought the Jesuits were supposed to be forgiving but it turns out a .453 GPA is the threshold of their forgiveness. 

Before I got punted from the school, I got kicked out of two dorms. The last time for coming home after my grandmother’s funeral to find the kid down the hall, a tall goober from Tennessee, hanging out in my room wearing nothing but Union Jack boxers. I threw a straight right down the middle for the cause and sat him down.

For that and many other infractions, I was not asked back. 

I couldn’t move back home and be a burden on an already fragile situation, so I found a tiny studio apartment a couple miles north of the college, far enough away to remind me I got kicked out, but close enough to pretend I might one day go back.

I got a roommate named Bishop (named changed to protect the innocent with a dash of guilty.) Bishop was top notch. Smart with a huge heart, who loved the drink just as much as I did. But somehow managed to make it to work which was a puzzle I could never solve.

And as far as work went, I came from a neighborhood where the quality of your job was based on two things; how much could you steal without getting caught and how much could you sleep without getting caught. So I found a job that checked a couple boxes. 

I scrounged up a job valet parking cars at Excalibur Night Club and North Pier that paid cash every night, usually between a hundred to two hundred bucks. You could hustle an extra hundred by parking cars upfront without tickets and crash out for an hour in the downtime. 

But parking cars wasn’t paying the bills, so I had a few side hustles. If somebody bought a brick of weed and couldn’t move the whole thing, I’d flip a few ounces for a cut off the top. The same went for mushrooms.

I made a couple hundred a month hustling pool. I wasn’t the best player but came up under some great hustlers who taught me how to let you beat yourself, leaving you shots I knew you couldn’t make, so when you lost, it didn’t feel like I beat you, so you kept paying me off.

I was also dialed into a handful of great thieves, who would reach out any time their main fence couldn’t flip their merch. 

On Fridays me and my dear friend Dave (rest in peace) would go out drinking, sometimes straight through to Sunday morning, then head to Maxwell Street at 7am to move any stolen merch we accumulated during the week, binging on greasy tacos, and haggling on street corners like a third world bizarre moving everything from stolen leaf blowers to cameras.

I knew how to survive but had no idea how to live and zero desire to be an adult. 

Not because I had some fucked-up Peter Pan fantasy, but because I viewed adulthood as fraudulent, irreversible comprise. 

If adulthood was a castle, my plan was to sneak in, fuck the queen, steal the gold, kill the king, free the jester then disappear into the countryside with nobody the wiser. 

But the drink was slithering around me like a boa constrictor. 

I was coming out of blackouts behind dumpsters in strange alleys picking pebbles out of my cheek, wandering back to my apartment in Rogers Park like nothing happened. 

Normal was starting to feel crazy and crazy was feeling just fine.

Then I met a girl.

One beautiful Chicago summer day, I was hung over as usual so I dragged my small black Smokey Joe Weber grill to the beach to grill some burgers and hot dogs hoping the greasy mess would calm my angry stomach. I lived one building off Lake Michigan on Jarvis street in Rogers Park. 

As I lugged the grill across the sand, I looked over at the pier that jutted out into the lake and noticed the thin blonde lifeguard in her skintight red swimsuit at the end of the long pier that jutted out into the lake.

I'd been asking her to come to my beach parties for weeks and she never came. Even hung over, I had to know why. I strutted over and as she spun around, I smiled and asked, "Hey, how come you didn't come to my party last night? It was awesome."

"What are you talking about?" she replied. 

"I keep asking you to come to my parties and you keep blowing me off. I was just wondering why?" 

She laughed.

"You're gonna stand me up AND laugh in my face?" I said, playfully pouting.

"You're an idiot," she said, "You keep asking me why I never come but you never asked me. You keep asking the other guard who looks like me, then the next day you stagger over here like an idiot and ask me why I never came."

Then she smiled, a sensuous, glorious, beautiful smile that whipped around and enveloped me. I couldn't stop looking in her brown eyes. Blonde hair ran all the way down her tan body, tickling the small of her back.  

"This is a travesty of American justice," I coyly replied, "Gimme the keys to your car."