heard	Mike Keneally			Dancing
			Seal			Seal
			Rush			Permanent Waves
			Wes Montgomery			The Incredible Jazz Guitar

The Legend of Slow White that's right, you get back there! (11-1) C onsider the following gentlemen for a moment. Fred Dwyer Merlin Olsen Fred Williamson Dick Butkus Jim Brown Bubba Smith John Matusak Lyle Alzado Brian Bosworth Orenthal James Simpson All of these men were professional football players. Many of them are Hall of Famers. Several of them have been part of championship teams. One of them is a double murderer. But setting that aside for a moment, there is one other thing that these men all have in common. All of them were watching a movie, a television show, or a stage performance at one point in their lives and suddenly said to themselves, "You know, this doesn't look that hard. I could do this." It's a classic myopia that comes with being a guy. Everything looks easy. But if you've ever seen a Brian Bosworth movie or seen Dick Butkus trade lines with Screech on Saved by the Bell, you know that everything that seems like it's simple often isn't. And perhaps that was the sort of thought process that was running through my mind last Saturday morning when I woke up early and drove out to Memorial Park to play flag football with a few of my coworkers. Hey, I watch a lot of football, I've read a lot about football… how hard could it be? Looking for an exercise outlet that I would actually enjoy and hoping to founder some new friendships, I accepted the invitation from one of the guys in my department with a sense of excitement I hadn't felt in a long while. I like the guys I work with, although I haven't had much of an opportunity to get to know them outside of the office. "It's a good time, it's nothing serious," they said I arrived at the park a few minutes early and found no one there. No big deal, I thought to myself, - taking the opportunity to walk along the riverbank and enjoy the early morning Jacksonville sunshine. Memorial Park sits on the St. Johns River just off of Riverside Avenue. It's about a mile and a half from the office I work at now, but as I walked along the water's edge I was struck by the realization of just how much of my life had actually somehow occurred in and around this area of the city. The Cummer Art Gallery where Andrew Gristina's mother used to work is just down the road, and on the other side of the park is a building where Chris MacEwan's mother worked for a brief while. In the time B.C. (before we had cars) I often spent a lot of time in both places waiting for rides home after school. From there it is a short drive down the road to an area called 5 Points. 5 points has been revitalized by the local art community and has become the "hip" artsy area downtown. But years before all of that happened it was a ghost town of empty stores and broken windows. And I used to work there. A few years after the divorce, my father befriended a Vietnamese woman who owned a greasy spoon called Hargrave's Steak House. We would hang out there a lot on weekends, and for a while I washed dishes there to earn extra cash. Hargrave's served rib-eye steaks with French fries or pot roast dinners for $3.50 a plate. One of the many soap operas that came and went in my life after my parents split up, my father met Mary when approving her paperwork for a liquor license. The two of them never really dated, but were more like close friends. During the war she married a soldier who brought her back to the states. The marriage didn't last, but the divorce was never actually finalized (or something like that) and the whole situation was a little too weird for my dad to get involved with. There was also this older guy (another Vietnam vet) who hung around the restaurant all the time who thought that he had some sort of dominion over Mary. She couldn't stand the guy, but he helped out at the restaurant and I think helped keep it financially afloat once in a while. All of this wrapped together to form an odd sort of "non-love triangle" that we got to be a part of on the weekends my brother and I spent with our father. We used to help him do little repairs to the place, and after a while it became sort of a hangout for us. I remember a Christmas party where one of the Vietnamese chefs gave me a tiny gift wrapped in green paper. Inside the paper was a small but intimidating pocket knife. He told me he had once stabbed a man with it. I was 13 years old. Hanging out at Hargrave's on weekends, spending my dishwashing money on Guitar Magazines at the newsstand at the end of the street. The guy who ran the newsstand had a prosthetic hand, and he would spend his days sealing up porno magazines in plastic wrappers so that you couldn't stand there reading them without buying them. He held the plastic wrappers in a vice grip with his plastic hand and ran a hot comb along the edge of the bag until the plastic melted. Laying in the back booth at the Homestead with my feet hanging over the edge of the seat, I read an article about my favorite guitarist at the time, including an interview with his famous father, Frank Zappa. I was 13 years old. Many years earlier I had gone to the Peterson's five and dime across the street from the Hargrave's with my mother, who grew up a few miles from five points and always loved shopping at Peterson's. My mother bought me a metal Star Wars lunchbox at that five and dime. (Man I wish I had held on to that…) Next door to the Hargrave's was a place called the River City Playhouse. Andrew and I auditioned for the play "Hair" in that theater. I sang "Little Wing" for my audition. Andrew sang the Doors "People Are Strange." Neither of us got a part in the show. I once took Amy Horne to that Theater to see one of my theater teachers (Jeff Grove) perform in some play about gay couples, I helped build set pieces for a Children's theater showcase there. The River City Playhouse lent us the foam rubber plant we used when Stanton did their production of "Little Shop of Horrors." I went there one Halloween night during my roadie years to hear a local band called Faith Nation. The lead singer was maybe 17 years old and he had a voice like the singer from The Cult. He wore red face paint during the show, and paced back and forth across the stage as he belted out songs about American Indian shamen. The band had just cut their first CD. I've still got my copy of it somewhere…. A few months later they'd renamed the place Club 5, and I helped set up monitors for a show guitarist Steve Morse did on that stage. My boss at the time bootlegged the show by plugging the monitor mix into a machine he had just bought called a DAT recorder. I got to meet Steve Morse. I was 17 years old. Down the street from Hargrave's is the Wendy's that Andrew peed on one night when we were party hopping with Rick Kick and company. Andrew had to pee, and Wendy's was closed. That made him angry, and he took a whiz on the side of the place… (and people wonder why I love that guy so much). And all of these memories flooded back to me as I watched the ducks on the St. Johns, the guy doing Tai Chi across the park, and the fisherman sitting on the rocks by the water.   And then the football guys showed up You know that moment in your life when you find yourself in a situation that you start to get just the slightest suspicion that you might have stepped into something you might not be fully prepared for? You know, the first time you go to a bowling alley to just have a good time and when you get there it's league night, or when you're playing pool at a bar with a friend and a complete stranger with a pool cue in a case steps up and says, "I'll play the winner?" That was the feeling I got when I realized the first two football guys were wearing numbered jerseys. I didn't know either of them, so I stayed by the river and watched them as they set up cones in the park and begin to do leg stretches. A few more guys I didn't know appeared and they all began to throw footballs around. One of the guys put on knee pads. The next guy showed up with another numbered jersey and an orange cooler full of water. By the time one of the guys that I knew appeared, I started to wonder in my ratty shorts and Thundercats T-shirt if I was actually prepared enough to be a part of this thing or not. All of these "really serious" guys were giving me a weird feeling about the whole thing. I mean, has anybody ever been in a pick-up basketball game with the guy who liked to call "reach in" fouls? Not fun. But I had dragged myself out of bed early, and driven all this way… eventually I said 'what the hell?' and waved at my co-worker, who motioned me over and tossed a football at me. My initial worries seemed to fade a bit as we tossed the football back and forth and I was introduced to some of the other guys there. Most of them worked at the same company we did, but in different departments. A few jokes were cracked, and I was starting to get a little more comfortable with the idea of being in the middle of these weekend warriors. Then the guy next to me put a mouth guard between his teeth, and said in a muffled voice, "All right, lets play some ball!" …ooh boy. No one knew who I was or if I was any good, so I was picked last. They had flags on belts like we used to use in highschool. It took two belts to get around my waist, but since I wasn't the only guy in that situation it didn't bother me all that much. For all I knew the belts were actually for highschool kids. We ended up playing nine on nine. Nine on nine, at times meaning one blocker, one QB, and seven wide receivers. At other times it was eight wide receivers. Then there were big middle-of-the-field meetings where the entire group argued over three down lineman rules, and five Mississippi rush counts… I was told to run short, and cover the guy wearing the Fred Durst hat. Sometimes I was told to "go long and then cut back." But no matter what play was called, nothing ever really went as planned, and there were interceptions almost every other play. When we were on defense we played zone, and a guy in a blue jersey with his name on the back told me to cover anything that "got past him." I quickly remembered just how hard it was to snatch a little plastic flag off of a guys waist while running at full speed, and there was even one guy who had this habit of continually ripping his own flag off his belt when he had the ball so that he could keep it away from would be tacklers as he ran with the ball. As for me, I caught one pass, threw one interception, and kept the guy in the Fred Durst hat from catching any passes. Eventually they put a different guy out there for me to cover, and I only let him get one catch on me. It was a touchdown, but hey.. nobody's perfect. Despite the few guys who obviously had played high school ball together and like to call out things in the huddle like "hot read" and "2-3-2" it ended up being a really good time. By the next day, my lower back, calves, and hamstrings were all sore as hell -- but I was sort of expecting that to happen, so it didn't make me feel so completely out of shape. Even more encouraging to report is that none of the guys who twisted their ankle or got kicked in the throat during the game were me. I got a little sunburned on my face, but for once it wasn't the kind of thing that incapacitated me for the next few days (you old-school readers might remember a few of those times…). The guy who turned his ankle took a day off of work to get x-rays and sent out an email telling us he wouldn't be able to play for the next three weeks (obviously he hadn't studied at the shrine of Spruill, or otherwise he would have simply taped it up, taken a few Tylenol, and slam danced to Bad Brains all night - jah rastafari!!!). I worked up a good sweat, had a couple of laughs, and was invited to come back out the next weekend.   I am 28 years old.       Who's the man?