I drove straight home and greeted my father. It was no big shock or surprise. On my last week in Florida, my father and his girlfriend Heidi met me in Orlando and we experienced the tourist version of life there going to Sea World and Universal Studios. Aside from a bartender trying to short-change me, probably because he thought I was young, drunk, and stupid, which one or two might’ve been possible, but not all three, we had a great time. It was certainly a proper way to end my stay there with something pleasant to launch me forward to the next step, which was…I wasn’t sure yet. I had no plan. Perhaps I just needed a week or two to think about which direction to go in, or maybe it would become clear on its own.

One easy thing to figure out was what some of my old friends were doing. This was a while after I distanced myself from the old south side clique because I saw which way things were heading with them, only to walk straight into something probably even more dangerous in Florida (no getting away), but there were certain members of the old group that were friends before, after, and beyond anything that group stood for.

My old friend Josh, whom I first exchanged glances with back when I was in first grade, was still around. Last I knew he was living with his mom in an apartment in Dunn’s Marsh, but as I caught up to him now, he was living in an apartment on the west side of Madison not too far from Verona off of McKee Road. It seemed that he had a steady girlfriend, which I hadn’t known him to have before. He went to a lot of parties and traveled around the state a bit in search of a good time, mostly. He had developed kind of an image that he showed most people, but I knew him back before we even knew what the word fully embodied. I regretted seeing him go down the path he was on, but there were still times when I could connect with my old friend. The smaller the group, the easier it was to see the real him.

I joined Josh and a couple others at his apartment one afternoon. The one we all called Uncle Rick was there. I hadn’t seen him since that night we were all at the Green Room playing pool and almost clashed hard with Big Ju and his two henchmen, one being an old acquaintance from grade school. The other man at Josh’s apartment was someone I had never met before who was a friend of Uncle Rick, a kind of thin and quieter man, certainly much quieter than Josh or Uncle Rick; perhaps on my level of quiet.

I never liked daytime drinking because I always felt hot and nasty, but these guys were doing double shots of some strange mixture of alcohol. I tried one. It was the most disgusting drink I’ve ever had, and I’m sure it showed on my face.

“You look like you almost didn’t keep that one down,” the unfamiliar man said.

It was definitely a struggle to prevent the gag reflex as I swallowed the drink. I wasn’t sure if it was the fruitiness or the bitterness of it, but I didn’t understand who would purposely want to drink something like that. It shouldn’t even be allowed as a form of torture for war captives. It was that bad.

All of us sat on a couple of couches facing each other. It seemed like Uncle Rick might’ve had a head start on drinking by the way he was acting. Naturally, we slid into a round of The Dirty Dozens. Our old south side clique used to always do that when there was nothing better to do.

“You big ‘blah, blah, blah’ face a**!”

I was always reluctant to play that game, not because I couldn’t do it, but because I wasn’t much of a fan of insulting people, but when it came in my direction, I felt obligated to stand up for myself. One time that comes to memory was when about seven of us were drinking one night about as far north in Madison as you can go near Cherokee Marsh where we thought it was safe. It wasn’t safe. Most of the group was talking about something, and Tyler took the opportunity to try to roast me. Nobody was paying any attention to what we were saying. They were all just drunk babbling with each other. Sometimes you gotta dig deep and come out of nowhere with something to put the other guy in his place. I was always a bit small compared to most people my age, but Tyler was even smaller than me. Even with the alcohol in my system, I was able to pull out something.

“You big, ‘We represent, the Lollipop Guild, the Lollipop Guild, The Lollipop Guild’ FACE!” I said in the best likeness of the voices used by the Munchkins that I could produce. Suddenly, everyone else in the group was laughing and slapping hands with me.

“Hell naw! That was a tight *** diss!”

Tyler stood there looking salty in the dark.

“I ain’t no Lollipop kid,” he said to himself.

He immediately stopped after that.

Here in Josh’s apartment, everyone chose their verbal weapons based on other people’s perceived flaws and weaknesses, as is usually done. Since I was small, most of the jokes were about leprechauns and things like that.

“He slid OFF the rainbow,” Uncle Rick said.

Josh was kind of heavy, so it was obvious what jokes were made about him.

“Mattress back! MATTRESS BACK!” Uncle Rick said and started laughing so hard at his own joke he started falling to his side on the couch, laughing so hard there was no room for breathing. The rest of us probably just thought it was funny how hard he was laughing at his own joke. Whenever there was a pause in the action, it was always, “Mattress back! MATTRESS BACK!” and Uncle Rick would fall to the side laughing identically each time.

I was getting ridiculous with it. There wasn’t much I could say about Uncle Rick because he had his stuff together more than we did, so I targeted Josh. The stuff I said was so ridiculous they mostly didn’t understand what I was talking about, but it was funny to me, like Uncle Rick’s jokes were funny to him.

“Andrew look like the Lone Outsider,” Uncle Rick said.

Maybe I was. I spent a lot of time in Florida by myself, getting chased by carjackers, getting threatened by strangers with guns and knives and whatever else.

“He look like the last Jedi,” Josh said.

I didn’t know what that was supposed to mean.

After a few “Mattress backs,” a few “I need me golds!” and a few uncategorized, we decided to end our little game. It was like I was getting re-initiated into the Wisconsin crew, or something. It was about 30 minutes of nonstop laughter. I’m sure the drinking helped.

I wasn’t the only one who came back up to Wisconsin. A couple of weeks after I came back, Jared also came back, but he was just visiting and would return to Florida soon after. He and I were like brothers in a lot of ways, but his impulsiveness often got between us and others.

One night I decided to head out to The Klinic on Park Street. I’m not sure what led me there. Probably it was because I went there a couple of times during my first days of drinking at the bars. There was always this kind bartender with long, dark brown hair named Jamie who worked there who appeared to have some kind of scarring on her face.

I didn’t know what else to do for recreation besides go to the bar and drink. People my age weren’t doing much else. Sometimes drinking was the only way I knew how to be social, if I didn’t already know the people. Certainly a lot of people can understand that sentiment, as there always seems to be alcohol at large social gatherings.