Back in college, (and we're talking undergrad here: 1991 to 1995), two of my best friends in the world were Jamie "Boo" Laws and Rob "Spoon" Thomas. I honestly can't remember why Rob was called "Spoon", but Jamie got his nickname because of the high school he went to. T.L. Weston is a public high school in Greenville, Mississippi; and, given the area, Jamie was one of the only white people at his school. Thus, he was called "Boo". Like a ghost, get it?

I also graduated from T.L. Weston, which bequeathed unto me the nickname "Spook". TO THIS DAY, when I go home to Mississippi, my old college buddies call me Spook... or some variation of it, (Spookmeister, Spookyhead Johnson, The Spookinator, etc.).

Anyway, because Jamie and I had grown up being a racial minority, (and paying for it in blood), we came to college thinking we were tougher than anybody else. I'm explaining this because one night during my junior year, me and Jamie, (along with Rob), took on the entire Sigma Chi fraternity... And won!!!

So it's a Saturday afternoon, and Jamie and me are out road-popping, (Rob doesn't come into play until later). Road-popping is a time honored Mississippi tradition where two or more individuals cruise the desolate, flatland roads of the delta and drink large beers. Once empty, said beer bottles are then hurled out the nearest car window at varying speeds in hopes of nailing a passing street sign. Masters of this craft have a success rate on par with most marine snipers, and some are even capable of landing the fabled "Bubba's Hook", whereby a person in the passenger seat throws a bottle over the roof of the car and hits a street sign on the OPPOSITE side of the road. I myself have only accomplished this holy grail of vandalism once in my life, and my penis grew three inches from the sheer magnificence of it.

Anyway, this particular day we were in the dark blue lord of all road-popping vehicles, The Bitching Camaro. More commonly known as the B.C., this 80's model Chevy was Jamie's car all through high school and college, and by my junior year, the car itself had ascended to almost mythical status. This was partly due to the fact that it was indestructible, and partly because Jamie was INSANE, and would randomly swerve to hit garbage cans, shopping carts, and animals for absolutely no reason.

Still, we always felt safe in the B.C., and I remember it fondly.

By four o'clock or so, the two of us have gone through six or seven road-pops apiece, which leads us to think that it'd be funny to switch from drinking beer to drinking Nighttrain. Ten minutes and a trip to the liquor store later, we're once again prowling the backroads while taking swills of liquid evil. For those of you with Mommies and Daddies who paid for your college, Nighttrain is what poor frat boys drink when they're broke. It's basically some kind of wine that costs a mere $2.50 a bottle. Now, I don't know about the economic climate where you live, but here, you can't even get a Happy Meal for $2.50.

Are you starting to see how far down on the liquor food chain the species known as Nighttrain is?

Okay, so we're driving along, and I spot a lone cyclist up ahead. The guy had one of those dorky bicycle helmets on, and from his bright orange, red and blue spandex attire, it was clear that he was a professional, (which is really unusual in Mississippi).

Note: I'm riding shotgun in the Bitching Camaro, and the guy on the bike is on MY side of the road. Thus, were coming up on him from behind.

As the distance closes between us, I actually start to imagine hitting him in the head with a bottle. It was the weirdest thing, and remembering it now, it was like one of those cartoons where the cat or whatever can't read, and he looks up at a sign, and the letters on the sign start to blur and whirl around in a circle. Except that for me, the guy's head started to blur and whirl around, then becoming a road sign, and thus, a target for one of the empty road-pops rolling and clinking at my feet.

Thanks, Nighttrain.

It was then that I heard the witch's theme from the Wizard of Oz playing in my head, and it seemed the cyclist up ahead was now flying around the Bitching Camaro saying, "I'll get you my pretty!"

"The fuck you will!!!" I slurred, reaching down to pluck a bottle from the floorboard, "How 'bout a little fire, Scarecrow?!?"

Luckily, Jamie looked over just as I was about to throw.

"Naw man..." he said, simultaneously grabbing my wrist, "If we're gonna do something like that, we need to wait 'till it gets dark."

I'm not sure what bothers me more. The fact that I was so drunk that I was actually gonna toss a beer bottle at another human being's head from a moving vehicle going fifty miles an hour, or that Jamie's only problem with this was that it was still daylight, and someone might see.

Fuck you, Nighttrain.

You'd think the realization of what I'd almost done would've sobered me up. Nope. In fact, the more I dwelled on it, the more my sick imagination convinced me that the cyclist had wronged me in some way.

Mike: "Let's go back."

Jamie: "Huh?"

Mike: "Let's circle around and come back up on that bike fucker."

Jamie: "Naw man, seriously, let's wait 'till it gets dark."

Mike: I'm not gonna road-pop him, I just wanna do the Mel Gibson.

What does it mean to "do the Mel Gibson" one might ask? Well, do you remember the part in Lethal Weapon when Mel Gibson is hanging by his wrists from a chain? And Gary Busey and some Chinese guy are torturing him with car battery cables? The scream he does each time he gets shocked is what's called the Mel Gibson Yell.

Sometime during my freshman year, I discovered that I can mimic this horrendous roar with frightening accuracy and surpassing volume. This eventually resulted in me gaining a fondness for "doing the Mel Gibson", which basically consisted of me leaning out of the passenger side window of whatever car I was in at the moment, and screaming at somebody. It works best when coming up from behind on somebody jogging, or checking his or her mailbox, or, um, riding a bike.

So Jamie makes a left, and then another, and then another, eventually putting us back on the same road, again approaching the cyclist from behind.

This might seem a bit bizarre geographically, but you have to understand that the Mississippi Delta is little more than a series of fields traversed by a tic-tac-toe gridiron of intersecting dirt pathways.

Jamie slows to about thirty-five miles an hour, (which was probably much closer to the actual speed limit), and we creep up on this guy from behind.

At a distance of five feet I stick my head out and unleash.

"BLAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!"

The guy fucking loses it; his peaceful ride utterly sundered by my T-Rex-esque trumpet blast of sound.

You might think I'm exaggerating about how loud and deep I can do this, but I'm not. I've scared off pitbulls.

Anyway, the cyclist's fight or flight reflex causes him to yank the handlebars sideways, which locks the front wheel and sends him tumbling ass-over-head to the ground. Given the impact, I would've thought the guy was really hurt, if it weren't for the fact that he was immediately up and running after us on foot.

Jamie was already gunning the accelerator to catapult the Bitching Camaro into a peeling retreat, one that, incidentally, pelted the pursuing cyclist with a backlashing Maelstrom of dirt and gravel.

Just to clarify, this guy had done absolutely nothing to us; but- in my drunken haze- I considered his demise a great victory over the forces of evil.

The next hour passes to find me and Jamie telling each other the story of the victimized cyclist.

By that time, both of us were so drunk that we'd forgotten our respective roles, and that our nearby counterparts were actually THERE an hour before when the actual event had taken place.

The sun was setting by now, so we decide it's time to head back to the dorm to start pre-going-out preparations. On our way, we stop at a little gas station/convenience store called Wild Bill's to get some more beer and a to-go platter of potato logs.

I'm starting to get sick, so I hand Jamie a crumpled five and slur, "Gimme' buy wit dat."

Jamie understood perfectly, and he went inside, leaving me to stumble around to the back of the gas station where I hoped to find a peaceful place to vomit.

Guess who was there...

Bloodied and covered in shit, my spandex clad victim is holding a running water hose over his left knee, tenderly trying to remove the embedded bits of gravel and dirt from an ugly red strawberry. The twisted remnants of his bicycle are leaned up against the back wall, and it didn't take a genius to realize that this guy had walked all the way back to town from the backroads, (which isn't as bad as it sounds, probably only four miles or something).

Now here comes the fucked up part, the part I'm at a loss to explain.

Upon seeing him, the desire in me to vomit vanishes, and the witch theme from the Wizard of Oz begins again. I stand there unnoticed at the corner of the building, seething with inexplicable rage and malice.

I was SO pissed, and to this day, I can't tell you why.

Eventually, the guy notices me glaring at him and straightens to his full, six foot one height, (I'm five nine, by the way). Up close I see that he's an older guy- probably thirty-five- with dark hair, five o'clock shadow, and a fairly muscular build.

With no hint of hostility whatsoever, he flashes a half smile and gestures to the hose. "Need to use this, man?"

I simply shake my head and slowly snarl, "You... mu... ther... fucker..."

For some reason, this tipped him off as to who I was, and his wide friendly eyes became narrow and trembling.

"That was you!" he stammered, half furious/half exasperated, "In the blue car! That was you!"

I just wanna take a moment here to stop and skip a little bit, because the ensuing conversation isn't really important. What IS important, is that this poor and noble gentlemen did NOT want to fight me; in fact, after he realized how rabidly drunk I was, he offered to call me a cab- AND PAY FOR IT!!!

I would learn years later that his name is Donald Lacey; and- at the time of this story- he was the youth pastor at some church in Leland, Mississippi.

Regardless, I somehow ended up in a fistfight with a grown man who had four inches on me and probably thirty pounds. Back then, I knew exactly DICK about fighting, and Pastor Lacey proceeded to manhandle me all over the place.

I don't think he was actually trying to hurt me, but I refused to take an assbeating, so I fought back with the only weapon my inebriated body had left to call upon.

"BLAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!"

I shit you not, boys and girls. I unleashed the Mel Gibson Yell. But instead of actually screaming, I vomited a dragon's breath cone of Nighttrain right on Pastor Lacey's crotch. Why his crotch? Because he had me bent over in a headlock, and it was just dumb luck that his genitals were in the line of fire.

Recoiling in disgust, he lets me go and assumes the Bowlegged Bat Stance people do when they've got something on them they really don't wanna touch. Do you know what I mean by the Bowlegged Bat Stance? The person is usually making a screwed up face and looking down at the afflicted area, their shoulders rising, their arms arched around like a pair of bat's wings. Next time you're out at dinner with a friend or loved one, take a cup of coffee or soup and dump it in their lap. They will immediately jerk up from the table and assume the Bowlegged Bat Stance.

Okay, while Pastor Lacey is wailing around and gnashing his teeth, (probably contemplating the merits of a God that would visit this Job-like persecution on him), I'm trying to keep from falling down. I stumble back a few steps past the edge of the wall, there to see the Bitching Camaro shimmering in the twilight, its cracked blue paint like a Picasso skyline. The engine is running, and Jamie is behind the wheel, having positioned the B.C. in "escape position" like he'd just robbed Wild Bill's or something.

At that moment, Jamie revved the engine, the deep growling pulse of American engineering rumbling out over the parking lot. HOWEVER, what I actually heard was the whimsical, commanding voice of Sir Alec Guinness saying, "Run Luke, Run!"

I ran, though in retrospect, I'm not exactly sure what I was running from. Pastor Lacey sure as fuck wasn't gonna chase me down. Regardless, I accelerated to a full drunken sprint and dove, headfirst, into the open passenger side window. This particular scene would've looked really cool if Jamie had hit the accelerator at that moment and we'd sped away.

That's not what happened though.

My T.J. Hooker dive into the car was slightly over the top, and I cleared the door, the passenger seat, and the middle console to land face first in Jamie's crotch, (I was the scourge of testicles that day), which causes him to drop his newly purchased forty four ounce mega slurpy right on the back of my head. The sudden cold, (combined with my homo-erotic revulsion), sent me scrambling away, and I knocked over a half-full bottle of Nighttrain.

The nauseating stench fills the car like a Yeti fart, and my stomach instinctively rebels.

"BLAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!"

I was able to get my head out of the window, and the last thing I saw before we sped away was Pastor Lacey standing at the far corner of the building, his spandex saturated with blood and dirt and intestinal gore, his once magnificent bicycle still twisted and useless, his face distorted by an expression I can only describe as horror of the soul. He was a religious man, after all, and that day he met the devil...

Interesting postscript to Part 1: Years later, I learned the identity of Pastor Donald Lacey when I went to church with a buddy of mine from Leland. I was then, and am now, an atheist, but I was trying to mack on my buddy's sister, and she was real religious.

During the service, Pastor Lacey told the exact same story written above, except from his point of view, apparently using it as a warning against the dangers of alcohol. I could've died right there in that pew when I realized what was happening. The sheer coincidence of it is mind-boggling.

I don't know if Pastor Lacey ever found out I was in his congregation that Sunday, or even if he would have recognized me after all those years, but I think I helped him grow as a Christian, and I'm proud of that.

TO BE CONTINUED...