One Friday night

As you can see by the previous post I found out the other day that a dear friend of mine from high school passed away in 2005. My son Patrick was asking me about some of the things that we had done together. There was one story that was innocuous enough for his fourteen-year-old ears to hear, so I shared it with him.
One night Troy and I were hanging out at my house watching Pink Floyd's The Wall, when the movie was over we began to talk about this guy that was in one of the art classes we had. His name was Greg. Now Greg was as about as straight-laced as you can get. The guy was at church everytime the doors were open and always did exactly what his parents told him to do. Greg had just gotten a job at a grocery store that had opened recently, Piggly Wiggly. As an example of what we then considered the iron thumb of oppressive parents that Greg lived under, he was complaining that day in school that his parents took his paycheck, tithed ten percent to the church, gave him money for gas and put the rest in a savings account for him, we were all aghast. Being 41 now, that doesn’t sound like such a bad idea. This was one of the first nights Greg was working as a bag boy. So naturally, Troy and I decided that it was imperative for us to go buy some things at the store. We discussed our purchase on the way so that everything would be worked out ahead of time. We stood outside the store until we spotted the lane that Greg was bagging at then entered. We snuck by him so that he wouldn’t see us until it was too late. We browsed through the store until we had all of our items then made our way to the check out. We were behind a lady with multiple carts of food so we had to wait for a long time. Greg saw us in line & smiled, waving recognition, albeit looking slightly nervous. Greg was a nice guy, always pleasant and funny, ready to help out with any problem you may have. But an easy target being that he was so straight, no cussing, drinking, or smoking. We constantly gave him a hard time about it, so he was looking around waiting for whatever it was he was sure we were up to. He would glance up at us, as we stood demurely by with our hands crossed in front of us wearing angelic expressions of innocence, patiently waiting our turn to check out. When the lady in front of us finally left we plopped our purchases up on the counter and the cashier actually made an uproarious snort and spit out some of the drink she had just swilled. Greg’s eyes became panic stricken as he looked around for the cause of the scene; he then glanced down at the counter and began shaking his head while turning beet red. We were buying two of the largest cucumbers in the store along with a pack of condoms and a jar of Vaseline…. Keeping straight faced as we paid for the items and walked out was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done, all the while Greg muttering under his breath that he would get us back. I had no idea a person could turn that red. The stares that Troy and I got from the people in the store were priceless. The second we cleared the window we damn near fell over laughing in the parking lot. Of course the purchases didn’t go waste. We promptly lubed up Greg’s door handles on his car with Vaseline and tied off several condom balloons to his radio antenna. When we made it back to my place we sliced up the cucumber and ate it with ranch dressing.
The following Monday in art class we sat, again demurely by, as Greg came in giving us the best stink eye I think I’ve ever gotten. He said that the people at the store were talking about “those funny guys” that came by Friday night all weekend, he kept trying to change the subject, not wanting to admit accidentally that he knew us… mission accomplished