UW Stout, Hot-n-Now, Stealing Gas

We were eighteen — that strange age where you’re legally allowed to vote but emotionally qualified only to operate a microwave. Our friend had gone off to Stout, chasing higher education like a responsible adult, while my best friend and I were deep in the culinary underworld, flipping burgers and making life choices that would make a priest sweat.

Our manager was thrilled we were going. He’d gone to Stout back in the day and partied so hard they called him Ferris, not because he was cool, but because he skipped class like he was trying to speedrun academic failure. The man lived his life like a deleted scene from Animal House.

We had a budget that would make a Depression‑era accountant cry:

  • $50 for gas
  • Half an ounce of weed
  • $20 for food
  • And a car named MacGyver, because it was a Pontiac Phoenix held together by duct tape, prayer, and 80s optimism. If you get the reference, congratulations — you’re old enough to remember when TV theme songs slapped.

We were halfway there, in Neillsville, when my friend — in a moment of cosmic stupidity — said, “MacGyver is running good for us!”

Five seconds later, the engine died like it heard him and said, “Challenge accepted.”

We rolled to a stop at a lonely intersection that looked like the opening shot of a Coen Brothers movie — the kind where you know someone’s about to make a terrible decision.

Then — and I swear on the ghost of Blockbuster Video— an old man materialized out of nowhere. Not walked up. Spawned . Like he clipped in from a different save file. He told us to push the car down a hill to a dealership. My buddy got out, pushed, and I coasted down like a sad parade float.

We got to the dealership, pointed out the old man who helped us, and the mechanics looked at us like we’d just confessed to seeing the Mothman. “That guy died ten years ago,” one of them said.

We sobered up so fast we could’ve passed a Mormon drug test.

Forty‑five minutes later, the car was fixed and they told us the bill was $150. Our entire budget was $70 and a dream. We called our GM — the patron saint of dumb teenagers — and he paid it without hesitation. The man had the energy of someone who’d once woken up in a Taco Bell parking lot and said, “Yeah, that tracks.”

We made it to Stout, rolled a joint, and hotboxed the car in a carwash like two geniuses reenacting the van scene from Fast Times at Ridgemont High. When we opened the door, a cop was sitting ten feet away. We couldn’t see him through the smoke because our car looked like Cheech & Chong’s tour bus had a baby with a fog machine.

The night was perfect:

  • House parties
  • Music
  • Joints between houses
  • Me making out with people despite being built like a refrigerator with charisma They used to call me Fastso. Now they call me Castro. My raps flow. Biggie would’ve nodded in approval like a proud uncle.

The next morning, we woke up, lit up, drank coffee, and realized we had $10 left. Gas or food? We chose chaos.

We got the gas we could afford and left. Unfortunately, the universe had other plans. A cop pulled us over faster than you can say “bad decision.” He asked where we got the gas. My buddy said, “The gas station,” which was technically true but spiritually unhelpful.

They brought me back to the station to identify the clerk. I described him in detail — down to the broken slushy machine — which did not make the officer happy. We sat in the station for twenty minutes, smelling like a skunk that lost a custody battle.

They found the weed. They weighed it. It barely — barely — avoided being enough to get us arrested. We were saved by the grace of one single gram, like the universe said, “These idiots have suffered enough.”

We walked out with:

  • A $150 fine for the gas
  • A $350 fine for the weed
  • A $650 weekend
  • And still $10 left for Hot‑n‑Now, which was the real victory. (If you don’t know Hot‑n‑Now, imagine McDonald’s but cheaper and with the energy of a restaurant that knows it’s dying.)

We were an hour late to our shift that night. Our GM just shook his head. He knew who we were. He hired us anyway. Probably because we made him feel better about his own life choices.

Cutting… A fun game to play

This is the story of how my sister dragged me into her darkness long before I even knew the world had shadows.

She spent her life circling the edge of something none of us had the vocabulary for. Bipolar disorder. Manic depression. The kind of suicidal spirals that didn’t just hit — they detonated. Every attempt was another crater in the family, another night of sirens, another morning where no one made eye contact at breakfast. She left emotional wreckage the way storms leave debris: everywhere, without apology.

She’s been gone eight years now, but the fallout hasn’t stopped. It still hums under my skin like a low electrical current. Trauma doesn’t disappear — it just changes shape.

Growing up, I didn’t understand her. I only understood the aftermath. The manipulation. The chaos. The way she weaponized her diagnosis to dodge accountability. My parents were terrified of losing her, so they let her rewrite the rules of the house. They excused what shouldn’t have been excused. They ignored what shouldn’t have been ignored. And in the middle of all that fear, I was the collateral damage.

She hurt herself often — not quietly, not secretly, but with a kind of ritualistic devotion that left her body covered in the history of her pain. By adulthood, she hid her skin like it was evidence. We never knew what she felt when she did it. Maybe she didn’t either. Maybe that was the point.

One day, when I was still young enough to think that any attention from an older sibling was a blessing, she invited me into her room.

My parents let her babysit me. Because why not? What harm could she possibly do?

Her room was dim, stale, heavy — the kind of heavy that settles in your lungs. She sat me down and revealed the marks she’d already carved into herself. She spoke in a voice that didn’t match the moment — soft, warm, almost tender. The kind of voice adults use when they’re teaching a child something important.

She made the darkness sound normal. She made it sound safe. She made it sound like something I was supposed to understand.

And I believed her. Because I was a kid. Because she was my sister. Because no one had ever told me that danger could smile at you.

She guided me. She shaped my hand with hers. She made it feel like a lesson, like a ritual, like a secret she was letting me in on. She made me think I was helping her. She made me think I was needed. She taught me how to cut her.

That was the real violation — not the act itself, but the way she rewired my sense of trust. The way she taught me that love could come wrapped in manipulation. The way she made me mistake her darkness for connection.

It took me decades to understand what happened in that room. Decades to understand the betrayal. Decades to understand the anger that still burns in me like a pilot light.

I loved my sister. And I hated her for what she did to me. Both truths live in me, side by side, refusing to cancel each other out.

That moment in her room wasn’t just a memory. It was the beginning of a shadow that followed me into adulthood, into relationships, into the way I understood safety.

A shadow that stayed long after she was gone.

Cocaine, Denny’s at 3AM, Broken Sink

Before we go any further, you should know I was a chef for over 30 years — which is basically like saying I willingly lived inside a tornado made of drugs, adrenaline, and people who think sleep is a myth. Given my childhood, it’s honestly shocking I didn’t become a lighthouse keeper or a monk, but no — I chose the one profession where chaos is considered a leadership skill.

Anyway, it was a Saturday night after service. We’d just survived a 400‑cover dinner rush in three hours, which is the culinary equivalent of fighting a dragon with a spatula. The screaming, the heat, the panic, the thrill — it’s like being in a war movie, and Tracy Chapman’s song Fast Car is playing on a loop, You want her to crash that car and have her head on fire and she has to run around hitting herself in the head trying to get it out, sorry but I really hate that fucking song!!!

Naturally, after surviving this, we celebrated the only way kitchen people know how: drugs, questionable decisions, and pretending we’re invincible.

Servers joined us, because misery loves company and also because they wanted free drinks. We all gossiped about the shift, who hooked up with who, and which customer deserved jail time for ordering well‑done Filet

At some point, I found myself in the bathroom taking bumps, then outside taking bong hits with my sous chef, line cooks, and whatever servers wandered into the smoke cloud like confused woodland creatures. Sharing drugs was considered polite — like offering someone gum, but more illegal.

By 3:30 a.m., we decided it was time for the sacred chef tradition: Denny’s. The land of fluorescent lighting and people who look like they’ve been awake since 1981 listening to the Human League’s greatest song “Don’t you Want me” You were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar…best 80’s lyric

It was me, my sous chef, and two servers. We smoked on the way, did some quick bumps. We sat down, got waters, and immediately started vibrating with paranoia and confidence — a dangerous combination.

Then I felt a kick under the table. My sous chef. Eyes wide. Sweating like he’d been interrogated.

He whispered, “Chef… I don’t have money.”

I checked my pockets. Coke. More coke. A shocking amount of coke. Absolutely zero money.

Now I was panicking. Two grown men, high as satellites, terrified of skipping out on a $9 breakfast because we were carrying enough powder to ruin our week.

Our solution?

Politely tell them we need to go to the bathroom.

Do all the coke. Immediately. Because obviously that would help.

Spoiler: it did not help.

We became hyper‑alert, paranoid, and convinced the salt shakers were judging us. So we came up with a plan that only two coked‑out kitchen workers could invent:

Escape through the bathroom window.

It sounded brilliant. It was not brilliant.

My sous chef — built like Smokey from Friday — launched himself through that window with Olympic grace. I lost it. I was laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe. When I laugh, I become useless. A chubby, wheezing mess.

I tried to climb onto the sink to follow him. The sink did not approve. The sink detached from the wall like it had been waiting for this moment. Water exploded everywhere. I was instantly soaked, looking like a pug that fell into a fountain.

But I was committed. I flopped through that window like a wet seal escaping captivity.

We hit the ground running — or trying to run — laughing so hard we sounded like two hyenas being tased. It felt like the slow‑motion scene from National Lampoon’s Vacation when they run toward Wally World. Pure cinematic stupidity. Chariots of Fire!!!

We made it to the car. We were free. We were soaked. We were idiots.

After a few minutes of silence, we both had the same thought at the same time. I turned to him and asked:

“…Did we even order?”

He stared straight ahead, completely serious, and said, “No, Chef. We didn’t.”

We sat there in silence, contemplating our life choices, our dignity, and the fact that we had just escaped from a restaurant we never actually ordered food from.

We briefly considered going back for the servers we came with. But it was late. And honestly, we’d used up all our bravery escaping through that window.

Like A Virgin, Touched for the Very First Time

This story begins with my sister — not the version of her people saw in school photos or family gatherings, but the version shaped by a mind that was constantly at war with itself. Bipolar disorder. Manic depression. Suicidal thoughts that came and went like storms no one could predict. We grew up in the 80s, a decade everyone remembers as bright and loud and full of innocence. Back then, life felt simple. Music was better, movies were better, and childhood felt like a place you could hide from anything. But innocence has an expiration date, and mine ran out long before I understood what was happening. My sister was thirteen or fourteen when the shift began. At first, it was small — a change in her tone, a look in her eyes that didn’t match the moment. Then it grew darker. Faster. More chaotic. In the late 80s, mental health wasn’t something families talked about. It was something they hid. Something they feared. Something they hoped would just go away if they didn’t say its name out loud.

My parents tried everything they could think of. Medication. Hospital stays. Facilities that promised help but felt more like holding cells. Even shock treatments — the kind of thing you only hear about in movies and assume doesn’t happen anymore. They were desperate, terrified, and completely unprepared for the storm that had taken root inside their daughter. You’ll get to know her as I keep writing — the girl she was before the darkness, and the person she became as it tightened its grip. You’ll learn about my parents too, and the impossible choices they had to make while trying to hold a family together with their bare hands. But they also were guilty of taking my innocence.

I’m not a writer. I’m just someone who lived through it and spent years trying to understand the damage it left behind. What happened in her room that first time — the moment everything shifted — became a shadow that followed me for decades. It shaped me in ways I didn’t understand until much later.

I was lucky to find a wife who helped me untangle the knots, who helped me breathe again. But the beginning of it — the moment the bright 80s cracked open and something darker spilled out — that’s where the story truly begins.

It started with things that didn’t make sense — little moments that felt wrong in a way I didn’t yet have words for. Back then, I didn’t understand boundaries or danger. I only understood that sometimes the world felt strange, like the rules had quietly changed when I wasn’t looking. The night it happened, the house felt too quiet. The kind of quiet that presses against your ears. I remember the hallway light spilling into her room, the shadows stretching long across the carpet. I remember feeling small, like I’d wandered into a place I wasn’t supposed to be.She acted like everything was normal. Like this was just another game. And I was a kid — kids believe what they’re told. Kids want to be good. Kids want to be liked. But then something shifted. The air changed. My stomach dropped in a way I didn’t understand but my body did.

Fear arrived before understanding. I remember the moment I tried to get away — the panic, the instinct, the sudden certainty that something was terribly wrong. I remember scrambling off the bed, my heart pounding so hard it felt like it was trying to escape too and then her voice. Calm. Cold. Final.

“Nobody is coming for you.”

Those words didn’t just scare me. They carved themselves into me.

The room felt darker after that. The house felt darker. The world felt darker.

And even now, years later, that sentence still echoes — not because of what happened, but because of what it meant: that the person who should have protected me chose to become the thing I needed protection from. I was just molested for the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last time this would happen, who did she learn this from…. Hint it was my mom.

A Strip Club, A girl with a guy’s name, Wild Mountain Honey

Imagine a strip club and not being able to go into because they serve alcohol and you and your friends are underage. It sucks, what 18-year-old chubby guy in high school doesn’t want to see titties smothered in his face for a few bucks? We heard a rumor that they got the liquor license revoked because they kept getting stung by the law, we decided to drive by to see if this rumor was true. Shit it was, there was a sign on the door that said,” Next week age 18 & over are allowed” So we were pretty excited, a bunch of 18-year-olds in high school with raging hormones, the feeling was like ride on a bumpy road with a bunch of books in your lap!!!! We came up with a plan all 4 of us would meet at my house after school, I ditched last period so that I can meet my drug dealer and get some weed, I didn’t believe in ever getting schwag, what was the fucking point? It was harsh and buzz never lasted; the good things will happen if you wait for the good drugs was always my philosophy with smoke. I managed to score some OG Kush- a beautiful lemon-pine fuel aroma with very high THC, so I got an ounce because really why wouldn’t you?

We piled into my car, a brownish Ford Escort that I happily named Heidi-IYKYK, and we were very excited in anticipation. Next, we needed music, music always plays such a vital role in my life and feel that a song can make the atmosphere feel exciting or just downward awful, side note I was at a bar once and played Billy Joels Captain Jack using $5 in quarters, back then that was like 20 songs, I sat high as fuck and started to watch the mood change after about the 4th play, people were less happy and didn’t really know why, my friend just looked at me and said “why do you do these things” my answer was very simple…..It was funny to me. Ok back to the story. we needed a playlist to get us going. here is the Playlist

  1. Buddy- De La Soul
  2. Posse on Broadway -Sir Mix-a-Lot
  3. Add It up- Violet Femmes
  4. You’re the First, The Last, My Everything- Barry White, seriously when your high this is such a great dance song!!!!!
  5. Jump Around- House of Pain
  6. Rush- Big Audio Dynamite

We arrived at the strip club, this was it, seeing naked girls and being very high, perfect little Tuesday night in my book. We paid our cover charge; he asked to see some ID’s and congratulated us because we were the first 18-Year-olds. I talked with the doorman and said if we could come and go, I would give him some Kush…He was very happy to oblige my favor. You should try to be generous with your weed; most people need something like that to just help in life. The place was packed, all the seats at the stage were taken by really old guys that seem to look shady, a ton of married men. We sat off stage and just sat and watched. It wasn’t what we expected at all. I think we were hoping it would be like the Motley Crue video of Girls, Girls, Girls, but it wasn’t? I was hoping for awesome dancing, bubbles, strobe lights, fun music…. nothing like that at all. But that all changed with a girl named Neil. She was the cocktail waitress that was serving NA drinks. I remember first seeing her, it was like that Waynes World screen where Wayne sees Cassadra for the first time. I was utterly taken away by her beauty, she had brown hair with very light streaks of blond, green eyes and was tan but not carrot fake tan, she smelled like fresh green apples and wearing overalls with no shirt on underneath her, she had so much money sticky out of her overalls, and Wild Mountain Honey by Steve Miller was playing, I didn’t even watch who was on stage, all I could do was to watch her walk and talk, and interact with the customers, she finally came over to take our order, I was so nervous which is weird because when I’m stoned I’m the most funny, open hearted person, I also get very horny, never sure why horny, but I roll with it. I said Hey to her, yes that was my ice breaker, and she said Hey back to me, she asked if I was having a good time and I said just enjoying the song and what’s in front of me, she smiled and said that she hopes she can feel like I look when she’s done. When I’m stoned, no hiding it!!! She tugged on my black kangol hat that I was wearing, I was a chubby guy but dressed well and had confidence when I was stoned. She kept coming over to us and talking with us, and I said to her, you don’t have to keep coming up to us, I’ll give you some weed, she laughed and said that we were just down to earth and none of us were hitting on her, she appreciated us for not doing that. We ended the night with her smoking with us and just being sweet. I don’t think she knew how amazingly beautiful she was. Turns out she was going to college for psychology, and this was her part time job. we talked a bit more and just laughed. It’s been well over 30 years since that night, but I’m always amazed that when I hear Wild Mountain Honey, I think of Neil — the girl who walked into a dingy Tuesday night and accidentally turned it into a legend.

Hello World!

Welcome to my brain — a charming little hellscape where trauma, anxiety, depression, humor, love, and pure unfiltered rage all live together like roommates who definitely didn’t pass the background check.

Everything I’m about to share is unfortunately true. Names have been changed to protect the innocent, the guilty, and the people who would absolutely sue me. Some stories will make you gasp “What the actual fuck,” others will make you sad‑angry, and a few might make you laugh so hard you question your own morals. I’ve done a lot of stupid things in my life. Might as well recycle them into entertainment.

How I write depends entirely on whatever music is blasting into my skull at the moment. Music is basically the emotional life support machine that’s kept me on this planet. One song and suddenly I’m unlocking a dusty memory from the vault of my big, overworked brain — a place I lovingly refer to as The Inner Sanctum of Oh Fuck What Now?