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Raintree apartments, a rake, shaving cream and a wig

I remember an evening in Provo while living at raintree apartments that required running through the complex me with a golf sandtrap rake ('borrowed' from a golf course in Vacaville California) and Crispy with a wig, shaving cream, and if I do recall, he had saran wrapped half his body.  We break out the front door at full sprint, me chasing Crispy who is shreaking wildly.  I think we ran around the pool, hopped the creek and went back to the apartment.  I think the whole event lasted 45 seconds perhaps.  I do remember it vividly though.  Funny to think that 20 years later I can remember 45 seconds of my life.  It was the same evening that I set the cookbook on fire on the stove.  Good times.

Visions of Pink Toilets

Ah, the fabled pink toilet of sophomore year at Raintree apartments.

Preston and I were wandering the aisles of the Provo Deseret Industry thrift store one fine day, and came across a lovely pink toilet in the hardware section. After parting with our hard-earned $4, we loaded it up in the back of his black 280Z (whatever happened to that Car anyway?) and made our way back to that dump of an apartment.

We had already disassembled the bunkbeds and placed them conveniently in the locker outside on the porch, putting our mattresses on the floor - mine half way in the closet. Did I mention that we had also removed the closet doors? More space that way.

The toilet fit right into our anarchist/girl-ogling/collage motif, and we decided to place our coveted palm tree in the bowl. I think we named the plant Fred. Can't recall. Well, Fred died a few weeks later, so we decided to turn the toilet into a fishbowl. After a couple days, the fish disappeared -- into the trap, I suppose. Never did find them again. So the toilet became an incense burner.

Ah yes, I love that toilet in the incense days.....we'd light up a pack at a time. None of that wussy one stick at a time crap. Laying on my bed in the middle of the day, music blaring at deafening levels, spending hours looking up at the swirling, churning smoke trails. Good times.

I miss that toilet. But it looked mighty fine on fire, floating down the Provo river on a giant square of green foam. Ah...those were the days.

One day it was just plain freezing

I remember this one day I was reading the newspaper about it being so cold that cows were dying.  Turning into a giant beefcicle.  If I recall it was like 21 below zero of something.  Whatever it was it must have been dang cold.  I had an 8am class and knew I was going to freeze but nothing prepared me for that morning.  I remember walking out and immediately my hair and nostril hairs froze.  My lungs hurt like a mofo.  We were living in the Hole which was about 10 blocks from campus, let alone the class was on the North side in the humanities building.  So my guess it was probably a two mile or so walk.  I could visualize freezing solid, lying against the gutter of the road, a frozen casualty.  Just like the cows.  I wonder if the crows would begin eating me.  Nah, I made it to class, moaning and groaning the whole way.  For some reason I just remembered that.  Provo could get dang cold.  Go see Russ.

A day that just popped into my head

For some reason, there was a day that I remember that just popped into my head today.  Felt I needed to share.  I need that happy feeling of pure burning of the bosom dropped down into blogosphere land.  It was the day that I almost ran over my dad's brother.  My dad's brother, well, he has an interesting history.  He's been in and out of mental institutions for years and even went to prison for having a meth lab in his house.  He was a meth lab guy before meth labs were cool.  He also worked in the railroad for a while, and if I recall had his kids living in an abandoned car for a while.  But that is neither here nor there.  At the time I was in college, he was in the Provo mental hospital (though I didn't know it at the time).  I was driving down center street and was about to turn right towards the famous Tommy's Burgers on 200 S. when a man walked directly into the street in front of my car.

Anyway, I screech on the brakes and we both just stared at each other for a moment.  The guy looked eerily familiar, but couldn't place him.  Then I realized that he was my uncle.  I hadn't seen him in probably 10 years or so, and he looked at me with some weird look on his face.  He looked/looks like a serious biker type guy and seeing him in gloriously mormon Provo seemed way out of place.  I remember telling my dad a few years later about the incident and he told me that indeed my uncle was in Provo around that time.  Kind of an odd karma thing.  Weird.

Making Some Cash

I was just over leaving pearls of wisdom in the comment section on Provopulse.com regarding the I Can't I'm Mormon website, and reminded myself of a great little nugget of life in Provo back when I was a starving student.

Back in 87-88, my sophomore year at BYU, I created and sold t-shirts, artwork, and whatever else I could to make enough cash to pay my paltry and yet, back then, painfully high rent. Two of the t-shirts I came up with actually did pretty well, and at $20 a pop, helped pay the rent and feed me for a short while. The first was clean and simple: "Brigham Young University: The Collective Unconscious" which did alright. I had read some Jung, and thought it a funny play on words. The ignorant were offended, when actually, its a fairly innocuous slogan. I sold maybe two dozen of these.

For the second, I was reading through some history of the old Brigham Young Academy, and came across this gem: "You can go to Provo or you can go to hell" - Brigham Young. Which is exactly how the shirt read.

The quote is from a conversation between Brigham and Abraham Smoot, who the Prophet was telling to go down to Provo to start the academy. Smoot apparently had just built a house up in Salt Lake, possibly had a child die or his wife suffer through a tough labor - don't remember the details now, but essentially he was not really interested in uprooting his family yet again, and so Brigham put some emphasis into the request.

I sold 50 or more of this t-shirt, and paid my rent for a couple months. As I mentioned over on Provopulse, if anyone decides to use either of these and make new t-shirts, let me know and I'll buy one.

Beggars Banquet

I believe what Preston is trying to express in his most recent posting is that sometime during our sophmore year, we began to participate in the practice of "beggars banquet," which is the art of table-scrap-diving. I don't recall any memories of dumpster diving behind Arby's -- that must have been after my time. But I do remember sitting at the Pie Pizzaria across from Helaman Halls or over at Caddy's near that dump Raintree Apartments and waiting for people to fill themselves on pizza or burgers or whatever, and leave behind a treasure trove of tasty morsels. Pizza was always the best food for this, as people usually left a few pieces unadultered once they were full. The process was simple enough -- we would scope out the restaurant, find a group of people who looked fairly clean and otherwise sanitary, and wait for the eventual leftovers.

I have to say, this was a practice I employed after leaving BYU and was struggling as a young single loser out in the harsh abyss that is Northern California. Not that I did it too often -- it would gross out most of the people I hung out with.... but what's the big deal? You'd watch the people who got up to make sure that they didn't do anything obscene to the food being left behind, and when the coast was clear, you'd pounce before the employees came along to clean up. No big deal. In fact, employees at one pizza place I frequented saw me do this often enough that they'd point out leftovers to me once in a while. I guess I hung out there a lot, since there's not a lot to do on a hot Sacramento weekday evening. Plus there was some hot babe who worked there that I'd always flirt with, and tried asking out on several occasions.

Hmmm....for some reason, she never said yes. Strange.

Scrounging behind ARBY's

So answer me this, what was the reason why we'd go behind McDonald's and ARBYs and wait for them to throw out food when they threw out the trash. Basically at closing time they'd take all the stuff that wasn't sold and toss it out. So what did I, well I go and grab that bag and have a feast. How I didn't die from a disease I'll never know, but man, I got a lot of free food that way. No one cared. Got to the point where the worker just gave it to me. I'd have like 25 cheeseburger to munch on the next few days. Gotta love it.

Worst Movie Ever

Thinking back on my life at the dumpy Raintree Apartments, I seem to remember escaping over to the dollar theater all the time. I can remember when they opened the place and it was new and clean, with the not-yet-so-common drink holders in the arm rests. I think it remained a dollar theater for about a year, and then someone figured out "Hey, we're not making any money" and they raised the prices.

But back in the salad days of crappy apartments and silly cheap movies, Verda Rae Hogg (pronounced ho-wg, not hog) and I used to spend a lot of time partaking of second rate films, and then usually wandered over to the Pie Pizzeria or Caddy's or somewhere where we could watch people and mock them silently. But one day in particular stands out in my memory because of the trauma we lived through. For some bizarre reason we decided to subject ourselves to My Stepmother is an Alien with Dan Aykroyd and Kim Basinger. We should have just taken a punch to the groin and been done with it.

I don't even remember the storyline -- after my nose started bleeding and my brain was sucked out of my ears, I lost consciousness. Actually, Verda and I were so disgusted with the film that we walked out and asked for our money back.

The thing was, we had found and used a 2-for-1 coupon for this particular film, and so they didn't want to refund us our $1. We didn't fight it. We just left.

Truly, it is the worst movie ever made.

Pentagram My Butt

Ok, this topic needed to be addressed. We've all heard the silly stories about the late night co-ed encounter on what was inevitably a dreary, possible foggy late night in mid-town Provo with a cloaked, hooded, and eerily suspicious individual thought to be "guarding" some sort of secret ritual going on over at the old, dilapidated BYU Academy, which was, of course, the original home to what is now BYU. Anyway, the rumor continued by those who dared venture inside at night was that the upper rooms of the Academy, as well as throughout the main building, were strewn with books and papers (ghosts of homework past?), but that one room in the old attic contained satanic scrawlings and supposedly a giant pentagram -- and that evil rites were carried out in this space each year. I've been told the room was painted blood red, while others claim it was black (yeah, well, when I tell the tale, I tell people it was teal). Oh, and the place was haunted, too. Yep, gotta throw that one in for good measure.

Forget the fact that nobody had actually seen any of these activities, nor had the hooded individuals thought to be guarding these secret rituals ever been substantiated. No, don't let proof get in the way of a good story. And the little fact that when they went in to renovate the buildings, they found no such room full of paintings. Or maybe part of the ritual was to paint over all the evil stuff and dust it up and make it look like it hadn't been touched in 50 years.

All I remember is that it was a great place to go if you wanted a girl you really liked to hold you tight while walking through the dark. But the place kind of stank.

Hey, Nice Rod

I want my fishing pole back. My dad gave it to me for Christmas when I was about 8 years old, and I used it through my childhood and scouting years. Sometime during our soph year at the Y, Preston and I decided to do a little bit of fishing up the canyon. So we drove for a while and found a secluded spot where we figured we'd get some dinner. Well, I had some trouble with my gear -- old line that just wouldn't cast right, and so was really just standing there trying to get it all sorted out when a ranger walked up and asked to see my fishing permit. Well, I didn't have one, so my rod was confiscated and I was issued a ticket to appear in court.

A couple weeks after the incident, I received a letter in the mail with an offer to pay a fine and not appear in court - which I took. However, after paying the fine and calling to track down my pole, nobody knew where it was. They freakin stole my pole, man.

I need to get myself a ranger outfit and pull the same gag and take some dumb kid's pole.

ultrathick shakes

For some reason, Provo Utah was the Mecca of thick shakes. In fact almost all the shakes that could be had in Provo, were not shakes at all, but merely soft ice cream. One could suck you skull inside out if you tried using a straw on one of these bad boys. It was a weird phenomena. Could not figure it out for the life of me. Hi, give me a shake, no, not a big cup of ice cream. I want a milk shake! Ah well, that is my rant for thee day

Monkey on Fire

There comes a time when every stuffed monkey -- especially those purchased at a local thrift store for less than $1 and that most likely contain some sort of microscopic infestation but hangs from your living room ceiling anyway -- needs to be set on fire. For our monkey, that time came one winter evening while we were watching television. For whatever reason, Preston knew it was time, and performed the brief ceremony, setting Mike's (yes, we named him Mike) head on fire and placing him out in the snow to die, right outside our sliding door and along a major pathway between buildings at the lovely Rain Tree Apartments.

But Mike would not have an honorable death. No, some cheese wad had to come along and put him out. Loser. By that point, it was much more than a simple flesh wound for Mike. The scarring alone would never heal. So we left him for the dogs.

We don't know who eventually removed the carcass, only that eventually -- after ignoring him for a day or so and letting the elements run their course -- his damp, charred body was gone.

I was never able to tell him about how I felt about him. Oh Mike. Poor Mike.

Mad Dog

Ah, yes, the boredom factor again. What the crap was going on in my head, I don't know. But one night I was sitting with my head in the closet (the doors having long been removed), lights off, incense burning, music blaring. Preston and other roommates were rumaging around, on their way to somewhere, or coming back from somewhere. It didn't matter.

We had gone through another phase with our room, and had pulled down almost all of the pictures and posters on the walls. The room was stark and bare -- and it affected me. At least the Phred the Hippie picture remained intact.

I wandered out into the hall and into the bathroom, and surveyed my tools. A bar of soap, some cologne, a bottle of shaving cream. I quickly shook the can, filling my hand with the foam -- and then smeared the white over my neck and face, and also into my hair. I believe I was listening to Front 242 at the time, or possibly Ministry. But I began to dance and flail, and I allowed the spittle to work its way down my chin and into my shirt.

Nobody ever tried to understand the mad dog, and I only departed into the madness on rare occasion. There really was no point -- but it sure beat just sitting there.

Anyway, I thought it was noteworthy.

Rain Tree Glow

Rain Tree Apartments were a dump. I have no idea what they look like nowadays, but I suspect they are much the same. At the time, there were 6 of us crammed into this tiny little bottom floor apartment, 2 per bedroom. When we arrived, there was a huge scenic mural on the wall of a quiet lake scene -- which we defaced over time. The best thing was the Wheaties cereal poster of Mary Lou Retton which Kirk Hedman sent away for (what was up with that?) but then begrudgingly donated to the cause, which we cut out to look like she was springing out of the lake. It was hilarious. We also had Tammy Faye Bakker up above the trees, with tiny helicopters and jet planes attacking her as if she were Godzilla. Which she is. Here is our living room a little later, with Bill the Cat painted on our sliding door, and cheap, possibly bug infested stuffed monkey hanging from the ceiling. That would be Preston with Tyler Nebeker (who, according to his parents, is living in Portland, OR) and Kirk Hedman (who last I heard was in South Jordan, UT). Also notice posters of Phred the Hippie on the wall, as mentioned here.

Now, the living room was nothing compared to what Preston and I did to our bedroom. I don't know how many layers of pictures, fishnets, posters, and so forth we had up, but if there had been a fire, the whole building would have gone up like a match. Each room contained a bunkbed, which we quickly dismantled and shoved into our utility closet. My mattress was then stuck into the closet, and Preston's moved to different locations depending on our mood. And then there was the $3 toilet (pink) which we purchased at D.I. and used for various things. First it held a couple goldfish, but they disappeared down the trap. Then we stuck a palm tree into it, but it died. So finally we just used it as an incense burner, which is what it was until the fated sweater burning ritual which sent it to a watery grave.

Here's a shot of my in the room before the bunks were dismatled. Notice the lack of white space.

I almost miss the place. Except for the part where it was a real dump.

Toilet on Fire

As Preston mentioned in his post, we collected a number of items of clothing at the U2 concert in Oakland in November which we later used in a pseudo-pagan ritual, conducted by the river at Rain Tree apartments one winter evening.

Preston, our roommate Kirk Hedman and I chanted for a couple minutes, and then doused a sweater and scarf in lighter fluid.

Here is me and Kirk. You can see the passion in our faces.

Once the fire was burning bright, we took up the flames with sticks, and placed the mass inside the sacred pink toilet which had graced our apartment for so many months (more on that in later entries). The toilet was positioned on a giant piece of green foam in the water, and we prepared for launch. The flames jumped up from the bowl, and Kirk closed the lid. Within moments, the entire seat was in flames, which reached up 7 to 10 feet or so. No kidding. Just a little FYI -- a well-used toilet seat, made of particle board wrapped in a sheath of polyurethane and plastic, apparently goes up like a match. With flames leaping into the night sky and our chanting at its end, we pushed our craft away from shore, and bid our farewell.

Just then, a cop sped by on the main road and caught a view of the burning toilet. He hit his lights, and sped off to round the block and come into the apartment complex. We ran.

Tommy Burgers

So many things could be said about the eats in Provo, but everything would be amiss without talking about the hamburger Mecca called Tommy Burgers. It was literally a shack downtown where you could get a variety of tastey treats, but mainly it was the Double Chili Cheeseburger that floated my boat. I'd order two of them and some gargantuan coke that would wire me to no end. You get your burgers, ketchup and read the same newspaper page over and over again on the wall. It was ritualistic really. Comfort food for the stressed out masses. Personally it gave me heartburn something fierce but it was important to partake. A junk food sacrament if you will, and I know you will. Oh how I could go for one of those right now.

401 W 100 North, Provo, UT 84601-2760 · 801-374-9733
Description: Some of Provo's best burgers are served up at this snug, white, cement-block building with red trim. Indeed, at lunch, it's likely you'll find the place quite packed with everybody from construction workers to local execs looking for true All-American fare. If the lunch counter is too full and it's nice out, just take your burger or dog out to the parking lot and enjoy the fresh air and terrific mountain views as you eat.

Eye of the Tiger

Thanks Jen for triggering this memory...

We often found ourselves hanging out at the Pie Pizzeria across the street from Helaman Halls, partaking of food, sodas, and the various festivities. Late one particular evening our freshman year, we were sitting and eating some pizza, sitting at one of the booths with a video game in the surface of the table, when in walks a strange lot of characters -- one or two of them in leather outfits (white, no less).

We're sitting there watching them, snickering at these middle-aged goofs in "rock" outfits when suddenly we realize who they are: the band Survivor. You now -- of Rocky 3/Mr. T/Eye of the Tiger fame? There was a concert that night at the Marriott Center - which was reportedly "packed" with 2000 screaming fans. Hmm....2000 screaming fans in a sports arena designed to fit over 15,000. Woo. Hold me back.

So the band was on the prowl on a weekend in Provo, Utah. They stood in the doorway, either looking at the menu or waiting for a rush of fans that never came -- and then started to mill around. It was actually kind of sad to watch these middle-aged has-been muscians, obviously looking for some attention.

So we are sitting there eating, when a couple of them come over to the table and started trying to play the game inside our table. It was a little akward, to say the least. And then one of them began to flirt with Preston's girlfriend, Astrid. It was hialrious. We couldn't help but laugh.

Which I think finally got the message across to them, and they wandered out...again, with no attention from anyone else within the Pie.