McEnroe’s Nuts

Uncle Mel and Aunt Dee and my cousins Randi and Lori moved from their apartment in the Bronx to Spring Valley when we were in junior high school. Spring Valley is adjacent to Monsey, and we all went to Spring Valley High School. Risa graduated in 1982, Randi and I in ’84, Lori in ’87 and Scott in ’88. They had a bigger house then ours, with a pool, and Uncle Mel was a great cook so their house was the place to be. Also, Randi and Lori were very popular in high school, whereas I was whatever the opposite of popular is. If I had caught fire in high school, people probably wouldn’t have even smelled smoke. Anyway, it always seemed like they were in a constant state of entertaining. They had a big sectional couch in the den, with a square white formica coffee table and a white four-section candy dish on the table. It was always filled with M&Ms (plain and peanut) and Hershey’s Kisses. My parents never kept candy out on the coffee table, I guess because Scott and I would have gobbled it all down before anyone had a chance to come over for a visit. I made a point of stopping over at Mel and Dee’s whenever I was home from college.

On this particular day, though, one of the sections of the candy dish was filled with whole walnuts.  

“Have a walnut,” Uncle Mel told me, “they’re good for you.”

Uncle Mel was a large man. He was my father’s younger brother, but he was much taller than my father, and heavier. He was a great cook, and his favorite ingredient, regardless of the dish, was butter. So when he told me to have a walnut because they were good for me, I was a little dubious. But I took a walnut out of the bowl and the nut cracker.  

An early season Mets game was playing on the television. They had a very big television. 1986 was well before flat screen TVs when 60” screens became standard fare, but they had a 60” box tv. It probably weighed 500 pounds. Aunt Dee was a nutty Mets fan. I’m sure none of us that April afternoon knew who Bill Buckner was, that he would immortalize himself as every Mets fans’ all-time favorite baseball player who never played for the Mets, and that within the next 6 months the Mets would be World Series Champions.

Aunt Dee, Randi and Lori looked on, staring at me as if that walnut was a sculpture in the Museum of Modern Art.

“Don’t use the nut cracker,” Mel said. “Just crack ‘em with your hands,” and he proceeded to crush a walnut in each of his hands. He had a really strong grip, and always made me grimace when we shook hands. Aunt Dee, Randi and Lori looked at him as he picked through the bits of shell and started to eat the walnuts. I knew I wasn’t strong enough to crack a damn walnut with just my hand, but I put two walnuts in my hand and was able to crack one of the walnuts by using the other walnut against it. They all leaned forward to look at the cracked walnut in my hand.

“Walnuts are good,” Aunt Dee said. “Right?”

“Yeah. Walnuts are good, but so are the M&Ms,” I said, and leaned forward to grab a handful of M&Ms.  

“Try another walnut,” Randi said. “They’re really good for you.”

“What’s with the frigging walnuts?” I asked. “I’ve never seen anything on this table that wasn’t covered in chocolate.”

“Just have another walnut,” Lori said, and I could tell she was suppressing a grin. “You won’t be disappointed.”

I shook my head and took another walnut. I tried to crack it in my hand the way Uncle Mel did, but I couldn’t. I grabbed the damn nut cracker and cracked it open. They all leaned forward and starting laughing as if nitrous oxide had escaped from the walnut. But it wasn’t nitrous oxide in the walnut.  

“What the hell is that?  A condom?” I asked. “Disgusting.”

They all continued to laugh.  

“Hey, you never know when you might need one,” Uncle Mel said, as his big bald head turned bright red from laughter.

“Yeah, but I wouldn’t go to a party or a bar with a condom in a walnut bulging out of my front pocket,” I said.

Finally, Lori stopped laughing long enough to explain that she got them from the party gift store where she worked. They had an adult section in the store, and walnuts filled with condoms were the latest gag. I admitted that it was pretty funny, that they had gotten me with the joke, and then asked for a few walnuts to bring with me back to college so I could play the joke on my housemates. It was Spring Break of sophomore year, 1986, and I was heading back to Oswego the next day. Millions of college students every year look to Spring Break as a time to relax from their studies and drink to excess. I drank to excess most nights at Oswego, so Spring Break for me was always a time to head back to my parents’ house to dry out for a week.  

Wally drove me two exits north up the New York State Thruway to Orange County to catch a ride to Oswego with some of my housemates.  I don’t remember our conversation during that 30-minute car ride, though I’m sure it consisted of Wally asking me many annoying questions about my future and about how a career and money were important and writing didn’t pay the bills. By the end of sophomore year, I had a reputation on campus for publishing several articles in the school newspaper, and a short story in the campus literary magazine.  Technically, I was majoring in Business Administration, though in four semesters I hadn’t taken one business class. I answered my father’s questions in mono-syllabics as often as possible. 

I think most people from time to time wonder what their life would be like if they had made different decisions at critical moments, how their lives may be different, better or worse. I’ve made so many bad decisions in my life and wasted so much time and energy chasing ghosts, but the biggest decisions I got right – spouse, career, community. Juli doesn’t like when I spend time wishing I had done something different in the past. Her theory is that the past is the past – if I’m happy now, then the past doesn’t really matter. But I wonder how different my life would be right now if I had said to Wally that day – “Dad, turn around. I don’t want to go back to Oswego. I think my head is broken. My brain isn’t making sense.  Take me to a psychiatrist so I can get diagnosed and treated.”

But I didn’t say that, and it would be another ten years before I wrestled those demons into submission with the help of a little blue pill. In the meantime….

I was meeting my housemates Gene and Mark, and Mark’s girlfriend Michelle.  Gene had arranged for his friends, Tom and Greg, to give us all a ride back to Oswego. Tom and Greg were Landscaping Architecture majors at Syracuse University, but they spent more time at the gym architecting their pecs and biceps than they did designing any golf courses or municipal parks.  

I lived with Gene and Mark and a few other guys in a house that should have been condemned around the time of the Bay of Pigs, but definitely no later than Watergate. Gene was the captain of the Oswego rugby team. He was about 6’2” and weighed at least 225 lbs. Tom looked like Brutus from the Popeye cartoons. He was incapable of walking in a straight line. He waddled from side to side because his quadriceps and hamstrings were too big for him to actually swing one leg in front of the other leg. Greg’s head was attached directly to his shoulders with muscles that seemed to start at the top of his head. But they all looked like weaklings compared to Gene’s younger brother, Larry.

“McEnroe!” Larry shouted as he emerged from the car. Larry may have been Gene’s little brother, but there was nothing little about him. Larry was about 6,5” and weighed close to 300 lbs. He played football for Orange County Community College and worked at construction sites carrying cinderblocks and lumber. When he wasn’t playing football or carrying bricks and wood, he was fighting, usually five people at time. Gene hadn’t told me that Larry was coming up to Oswego with us, so I was surprised to see him. Whenever he came up to Oswego to visit Gene, he treated me like I was his pet normal-sized person.

“McEnroe!” he shouted again, and grabbed me in a bear hug and lifted me off the ground. “Is this your dad? Mr. McEnroe?” he said to Wally, and gave Wally a big handshake.

I was mortified. I felt like crawling under Tom’s 1976 Thunderbird. Everyone at Oswego thought I looked like John McEnroe, and most people at Oswego didn’t even know my name was Glenn. Everyone called me McEnroe. I think even some of my professors called me McEnroe. I was always embarrassed when someone called me McEnroe in front of my parents, but I guess I would have been even more embarrassed if my father had called me by my childhood nickname in front of my college friends. It didn’t take long to find out.

Larry held me against his hip like I was an infant, and with his other hand he shook Wally’s hand. “Nenny, I wish you had John McEnroe’s money,” my dad said, and everyone laughed.

“Nenny?” Gene screamed. “Nenny McEnroe?! Oh, that’s a riot!” Gene was always saying everything was a riot. I had a very low threshold for embarrassment, developed over the years by an undiagnosed mental problem, a massive inferiority complex, a teenaged face full of acne,  and all honed to a sharp point by my parents’ incessant questions about my future, a future that I couldn’t see and so did everything possible to sabotage.  

“McEnroe’s father’s a riot!” Tom said, and then everyone shook Wally’s hand.  

My face was bright red. I grabbed my overnight bag out of my father’s car and put it in the trunk of Tom’s Thunderbird. Mark’s mother had dropped him and his girlfriend off at the high school and drove home already. He threw their bags in the trunk also. Brutus got behind the wheel, Michelle was told to get in the middle front seat, Greg The Neck was riding shotgun, and Larry and Gene got in the back seat.

“Nenny McEnroe and Mark share the hump,” Larry said.

Wally watched as Mark and I climbed into the back seat, and Gene closed the door. The rear of the car sank down to the parking lot with a clank as the rear bumper banged against the pavement. The rear floor boards of the Thunderbird were rusted through, so Tom had sheets of plywood for people to rest their feet on. I had been in the car many times before. If the plywood rattled aside, you could see the highway cruising underneath you at 80 mph. We called it the Fred Flintstone Mobile because you could put your feet on the road while sitting in the back seat. But we considered the removable wooden floorboards to be an asset. As soon as we finished drinking a can of beer in the car, we’d just slide the plywood to the side and drop the empty beer can onto the road. The cops would never catch anyone with an open container in that car.

“Everyone out of the car,” Wally said. “There’s no way I’m letting any of you drive four hours in that car. You’ll be dead before you get to the Roscoe Diner.”

Everyone got out of the car. Though two minutes earlier I had wanted to strangle my father for calling me Nenny, I had to admit it was pretty cool watching Wally command an audience with the likes of Larry the Mountain, Brutus, and Greg the Neck. I don’t think I had ever witnessed Larry listen to a thing anyone had ever said before. He did whatever he wanted to do. I had never met a person that had less regard for anything anyone else cared about. He seemed to get stronger as he weakened the people around him.

“Mr. Sloves,” Mark said, “if you drive me and Glenn and Michelle up to my house the next town over, my mom can drive us to the bus stop at West Point to get the SO bus. That’s how Michelle and I were planning to get back to school anyway, before Gene said there was room in the car.” I liked Mark. He knew I was doubly embarrassed when Wally called me Nenny, and I knew he called me Glenn intentionally.

“That was before Larry invited himself up for the week,” Gene said, and everyone turned to look askew at Larry. People tried not to look Larry in the eye. He stared back at us the way a mountain might stare back at a stranded hiker – without a pebble’s worth of empathy.  

“Hey, man, I just need to get out of town for a while,” Larry announced to everyone, and we could all guess what that meant. Larry needed to get away from the local cops, most likely because of his most recent bar fight.  

Wally drove Mark, Michelle and me up to Cornwall, just north of Monroe. Mark’s mother made us lunch – cheese sandwiches on white bread with mayo and split pea soup. I had never had split pea soup before, and it was delicious. Every time I have split pea soup, I think of that lunch in 1986. She drove us to the bus stop in West Point, and we had a three-hour uneventful bus ride to Syracuse. At Syracuse, we had to wait for the next SO (Syracuse-Oswego) bus.  The SO bus ran every hour on the hour, and was about a 45-minute ride to Oswego. It was mid-afternoon by now, and with any luck we’d be back home to Oswego by 4 p.m.

The Syracuse bus station was a bus station, in Syracuse. That seems to be the best way to describe it. It was dank. The linoleum floor was crusty and sticky, and so were some of the people waiting for their bus. We sat on a bench in front of our gate and waited for our bus to pull into its slot. A middle-aged man in a camouflage army jacket walked around the station whispering “Need hash? Pot?” Mark told him to get lost.

“I hate people who pretend to be vets,” Mark said. “That guy’s probably been a loser since the day he was born.” Mark grew up just a few miles from West Point.

I turned my head to watch the drug dealer, pretend-vet walk away, and that’s when I saw trouble.

“Oh, fuck,” I said. “It’s Double Trouble.”

“Oh fuck. I hate that guy,” Mark said.

Michelle saw Double Trouble walking towards us. “Oh, he’s not that bad,” Michelle said. “You guys should give him a break. He just needs some friends.”

Double Trouble was a student at Oswego, but I don’t think anyone ever saw him attend a class.  He was short, about 5’5”, with long greasy brown hair and a horrible scraggly goatie. He always wore a fake leather vest. We called him Double Trouble because he tried very hard to look like Stevie Rae Vaughn, the rock/blues singer and one of the world’s greatest guitar players. His band was Stevie Rae Vaughn and Double Trouble.  When you’re a world famous musician you can get away with wearing a leather vest all the time, and maybe not showering very often and having a straggly goatie. But when you’re a moron living at SUNY Oswego but not attending classes, the look doesn’t help attract friends. It makes you repulsive. No one liked Double Trouble.  

“Are you guys waiting for the SO bus?” he asked.  

If looks could kill, the guy would have fallen over dead right there in the bus station. Mark hated Double Trouble more than anyone because Double Trouble tried to hit on Michelle every chance he got. I think Michelle was the only person on campus that ever said more than five words to the guy, unless those words were “Get the fuck out of here.” Michelle was one of those rare people that only saw the good in people. I guess I wish I was more like Michelle.  

“We are taking the next bus,” Michelle said. “Would you like to sit with us?”

Michelle graduated from Spring Valley High School the year before me, so I had known her for a few years. We weren’t friends during high school, but when I got to Oswego and I saw her I could at least say, “Hi, you graduated from Spring Valley, right?”  She and Mark starting dating the first day of college. But after Mark heard her invite Double Trouble to sit with us for the 45 minute bus ride to Oswego, I think he was ready to break up with her.

The bus pulled in and we all trudged up the steps with our bags. The bus driver took our tickets. He was fat. His ass hung over the sides of the driver’s seat like sacks of rice. I wondered how long he’d been driving a bus. I bet when he got the job twenty years ago, or maybe longer, he was much thinner. You could tell that under that fat were old, stagnant muscles, just waiting to do something, lift something, throw something. But all he did was step on the gas and break pedals and turn the steering wheel.  

Mark picked an empty row close to the back of the bus. He took a window seat, and Michelle sat next to him. I took the opposite window seat, and Double Trouble took the other aisle seat so he was sitting next to Michelle, across the aisle. The bus pulled out of the station and headed north on Route 481, and I stared out the window and tried not to listen to Double Trouble trying to be smooth with Michelle. I glanced over at Mark and saw him clenching his jaw. He did that when he was pissed off. I thought he was going to shatter his own teeth.

After a few miles, Double Trouble walked to the back of the bus and went to the bathroom. I remember thinking I’d have to be pretty damn desperate to use a Greyhound bus bathroom, but there was no making sense of Double Trouble. But after a minute, I realized that he wasn’t taking a piss.

He opened the door to the bathroom and walked back to his seat. A cloud of hash smoke followed him down the aisle. That moron had bought hash from the dirt bag in the bus station.  The bus wasn’t full of passengers, but every passenger turned their head to look to see who had just gotten high in the bathroom, and so did the bus driver. 

“Are you out of your fucking mind?” I said to Double Trouble as he sat down next to me.

“What are you talking about, McEnroe?”

“Fuck you, asshole.  Everyone on the bus knows you just got high in the bathroom. It smells like your damn dorm room, moron,” I said.

“Oh, just relax. The bus driver doesn’t care,” he said, and that’s when the bus driver pulled into the parking lot of the Clay Municipal Police Station.

He stopped the bus with a jolt. He got out of his seat and walked down the aisle, his fat ass bouncing off of each arm rest. He pointed two fingers from each hand at the four of us.

“You four, off the bus. Now!” he demanded.

“We didn’t do anything,” Mark said. “It was that moron,” and he pointed to Double Trouble, who just sat staring straight ahead. He was high, so maybe he was trying to make himself invisible. I inched closer to the window, trying to distance myself from Double Trouble.

“I don’t care,” the bus driver said. “You four got on the bus together, and you four are getting off the bus together. You can walk off on your own, or I can go into the station and have the cops pull you off.”

“Come on Markie, we better get off the bus,” Michelle said. She always called him Markie.  

“You’re a fucking dead man,” Mark said to Double Trouble, who by now realized that he wasn’t invisible, much to his significant disappointment.  

We grabbed our bags from the overhead compartments and got off the bus.  

“You’re lucky I don’t drag your ass into the station,” the bus driver said to Double Trouble, and I know Mark was hoping that he would.

“Please, sir,” Mark said to the bus driver. “Just let my girlfriend get back on the bus. You know she didn’t get high. It was just this moron,” and he pointed at Double Trouble. I stepped further away.

“Fine. Get back on the bus, girlfriend,” the driver said to Michelle, “but you all better not ever try to get back on my bus again.”

Michelle got back on the bus, and the bus pulled away. I stood in the parking lot of the Clay Municipal Police Station. My first thought was not about how were we going to get to Oswego, but rather how was I going to avoid being an accessory to murder. I was certain Mark was going to strangle Double Trouble right there in the police department parking lot.  

“If you ever talk to my girlfriend again, I’m going to kill you. If I ever see you at a bar, you better run for your fucking greasy life back to whatever rock you sleep under. Keep the fuck away from me for the rest of your pathetic life,” Mark said, and he jammed his finger into Double Trouble’s pseudo-leather vest.

“I guess we’re hitching, but we can’t stick our thumbs out in front of a damn police station.  Let’s walk a few miles,” I said to Mark, hoping to get him focused on anything other than killing Double Trouble. If I were Double Trouble, I would have crossed the street and walked in the opposite direction. He probably should have hitchhiked back down state to wherever he called home. I really did think Mark was going to kill him, or at least seriously kick his ass, but Double Trouble walked with us.

“It was just a little hash,” he said. “People are so uptight.”

“There were grandmothers and little kids on the bus, you fucking moron,” I said.

“I don’t want to hear another word out of your mouth for the rest of your life,” Mark said.

We continued walking north on 481 for a few minutes, just to get away from the police station, and then Mark and I took turns sticking our thumbs out. We wouldn’t let Double Trouble try to hitch. Charles Manson would have had better luck flagging down a ride.  

After about thirty minutes, someone in a pick-up truck stopped and drove us to Fulton, which was about 15 miles south of Oswego. We made Double Trouble sit in the bed of the truck, and I was happy whenever we went over a bump in the road. He dropped us off at a gas station.  Mark was going to call some of our friends to see if anyone could pick us up, but instead he turned to Double Trouble.

“Asshole, do you have any money?”

“Yeah, I have about fifty dollars left,” Double Trouble answered sheepishly. By now his high had worn off and he was starting to realize just how close he was to getting his ass kicked.

“Give me your damn money,” Mark demand. “All of it!”

Double Trouble gave Mark all of his money. Mark counted it. We waited at the gas station for a  few minutes until a car pulled in. Ironically, its was a Thunderbird. Mark walked up to the elderly man as he stepped out of the car.

“Excuse me, sir. We’re trying to get back to Oswego. If you give us a ride, I’ll pay to fill your tank.”

“Deal,” the old man said.

Mark paid for the gas, about $20, and pocketed the rest of Double Trouble’s money.  

We piled into the Thunderbird, and finally made it back to Oswego. We had the guy drop us off at The Woodshed, which was one of the main college bars. Mark and I walked in. Double Trouble tried to follow us in, but Mark took one look at him, and Double Trouble walked across the street to Broadwells, another bar. That was the first intelligent decision Double Trouble had made that day. In 1986, Oswego boasted the most bars per capita in the state of New York. I was 20 years old, but had fake ID since I was a freshman. We had a few beers and then walked across the bridge back to our house. By now it was about 8 o’clock at night. Classes resumed the next day.

As I said before, the house we lived in should have been condemned some time in the late 60’s or early 70’s. Mark kicked open the front door. The doorknob didn’t work, so we relied on humidity to swell the door shut. It was convenient when your hands were full, and since everyone knew Gene lived in the house, we never worried about anyone breaking in.  

Gene and Larry were in the living room drinking beers. 

“What the hell took you so long?” Gene said.

“Sorry about that, guys,” Larry said. “I needed to get out of town.” I had never heard Larry apologize to anyone. Gene must have told him to apologize.

“We had to fucking hitch from Syracuse,” Mark said. “That moron Double Trouble was on our bus. The idiot bought hash from some dirt bag at the bus station, and he got high on the bus.  We all got thrown off.”

“Oh my god!” Gene said. “That kid is the biggest moron on campus.” We went to SUNY Oswego, and that was a bold statement. Honestly, though, the truth of the matter was that SUNY Oswego was a pretty good school. The vast majority of students were focused, had direction, took advantage of opportunities, and graduated prepared to participate in the real world.  Unfortunately, I didn’t know any of those students. To say that I was a first mate on a Ship of Fools would have been an accurate statement, and we sailed the seas of Lake Ontario for four years without docking once for a sobriety check. Juli and I have told our children that they can apply to any college, except SUNY Oswego. “Because someone might remember dad,” they reply when asked.

“Death is having a party,” Gene said. “Drop your bags and lets go. We’ve been waiting for you.”

Death was a friend of Gene’s from the rugby team. I don’t remember his real name, but he was always very nice to me. I was Gene’s housemate and good friend. The rugby players kept an eye out for me. Death was an Industrial Arts major, which was a popular major at Oswego.  When he wasn’t playing rugby or lifting weights, he was sawing wood and hammering stuff.  He had calluses on his hands as thick as leather gloves, and he used to tell people they could put their cigarettes or joints out on the palm of his hand for a beer. I had never seen him flinch, and had bought him many beers over the years at the attempt.

I walked up the steps to my bedroom. I actually had a suite of three rooms, which is un-heard of in a college setting. The one drawback was that I had to walk through the bathroom to get to my suite. I walked into the bathroom. There was 2-3” of standing water in the bathtub, and the milk crate that we stood on to keep out of the sludgy water while we showered was laying face down in its’ lowest position, which kept us 12” above the bottom of the tub. Depending on how slow the drain was, we had to flip the milk crate either onto its side which would keep us 15” above the bottom of the tub, or sometimes even onto its high end so that we were standing 18” above the bottom of the tub. The tub wasn’t 18” deep, though, so if you were standing on the long side of the milk crate you were certain to cause a cascade of tub water into the kitchen. In the one week the house was empty during Spring Break, the tub had still not fully drained.  

I walked through the other bathroom door and into the Titty room. We called it the Titty room because it was decorated with posters of naked Playboy centerfolds. There was a recliner chair in one corner of the room, and if you reclined all the way back you stared up at a plastic tarp filled with water that was dirtier than the bathtub water and filled with all sorts of bugs. The roof leaked. After every rain storm or snow melt, we had to tilt the tarp to drain the water and bugs into a bucket which we then dumped out the window onto the neighbors’ boat. He was a towny, which is what college students everywhere call people that actually live in the town for more than four years. He always called the cops on us when we had a party, so we retaliated however we could.  

I dropped my overnight bag in the corner of the Titty room and then we all walked across the bridge to Death’s party. You’d think that after a week of Spring Break, people would be relaxing and getting ready for a fresh start at the rest of the school year, but not us, and not at Oswego.  The house was jammed full of people. At 150 pounds, I was always very good at finding the slivers of open floor space to maneuver towards the keg of beer, but that night I didn’t have to move an inch. I don’t know if Larry actually experienced his first ever sense of remorse because Mark and I had to take two busses and two pick-up trucks to get home, or if Gene had told Larry that he had to take care of me that night. In Oswegoese, taking care of someone meant you had to make sure they had as much beer as they wanted all night long.

“McEnroe needs a beer,” Larry shouted above the loud music and the people shouting to hear one another. “Out of my way.”

Larry picked up the keg with one hand and carried it over to where I was standing, on the other side of the room, pushing people out of the way with his other hand. People would have fallen if the room hadn’t been so crowded; there simply wasn’t enough room to fall, so people just leaned against one another to get out of his way. He filled my beer cup. Everyone that had been making their way over to the keg before Larry carried it across the room to fill my beer now how to do their best to make their way over to me to fill their cups. I saw a girl from one of my writing classes on the other side of the room, so made my way over to her to say hello.  After a few minutes I heard Larry shout, “McEnroe needs a beer!” And again he carried the keg over to me to fill my beer. After a while, even the idiots at Oswego figured out that if you wanted a beer that night, your best strategy was to stand next to me. It wasn’t often that I was the life of the party, but that night I was. This went on all night long, until the 3 or 4 kegs were kicked and everyone was very drunk.  

Gene, Larry, Mark and I made our way back across the bridge to our house. Oswego was divided into two sections, the campus side of the bridge, where rents were more expensive but the stumble home was shorter, and the other side of the bridge, where rents were cheaper and the stumble home was longer. I never minded the longer walk home, as it gave me a chance to sober up a bit before I passed out drunk most nights.

When we got home, Gene announced, “I buy, you fly, McEnroe,” which meant he would pay for our midnight snacks if I agreed to walk to the supermarket.

“Deal,” I said.

Price Chopper was the local supermarket, and it was directly across the street from our house.  It was open 24 hours, which was perfect for our drunken midnight food binges. Lately, we were on a turkey and cheese hoagie kick.

“I’m coming with,” Larry told me. He had been standing next to the keg all night long to make sure that I had a full cup of beer all night long, so we were both pretty damn drunk. I have no idea how many cups of beer Larry drank that night. On a previous visit, I had watched him chain drink a twelve pack and then walk a straight line to the bathroom. He wasn’t walking so straight now as we made our way through the Price Chopper parking lot. If he fell onto me, I was a dead man.  

Price Chopper had their midnight shift on, which meant there was only one cashier, the store manager, and one stock boy in the store. It must have been 1 or 2 in the morning by now, so there were no other shoppers. The night shift manager was a towny college student, which meant he grew up in Oswego and was now enrolled at the college. He had been working at Price Chopper since he was 16 years old. He was tall and was on the Oswego basketball team, the Lakers. His name was Walter, but everyone called him Walton after Bill Walton, the Los Angeles Lakers hall of fame center. We had met as freshman in a Greek literature class, which provides graduating students with as much practical knowledge as a fish taking a class on how to fly an airplane.  

I grabbed a shopping basket and starting walking up and down each aisle. Larry stayed with me, and Walton got out of the manager’s office and followed us. He knew what drunks did at night at Price Chopper.  

“Salami,” Larry said excitedly, and he picked up a package of pre-sliced Oscar Meyer salami.

“Don’t need it,” I said. Larry ripped open the package and ate the entire twelve slices of salami in one big gulp. He put the package down and kept on walking. Walton picked up the empty package and continued to follow us.  

I picked up a few packages of sliced turkey and put it in the basket.  

“Swiss cheese,” Larry said, grabbing a package.

“Don’t need it,” I said, and I picked up a package of Velveeta and put it in the basket. Larry ripped open the Swiss cheese and ate the entire package in one bite. He tossed the empty package aside. Walton picked up the package. 

“Eggs,” Larry said.

“Don’t need eggs,” I said, but Larry cracked a raw egg against his chin and guzzled the raw egg down his throat.   

We rounded a corner.  We needed pickles and a three foot long hoagie roll. I was pretty sure we had mayonnaise at home. I headed for the pickle aisle, but Larry went down a different aisle.  Walton followed Larry. I could no longer see Larry, but I could hear him as he shouted out foods. “Ring Dings, Pretzels, Banana.”

The fresh breads were near the bulk candy and nuts section of the store. They had about 25 massive barrels, each about two feet in diameter and three feet high that contained bulk foods – peanuts, pretzels, dried beans, coffee beans, etc etc, and walnuts. I hadn’t thought about the condom-filled walnuts all day, but they were still in my sweatshirt pocket. I grabbed a plastic bag, filled it with walnuts, and dropped the condom-filled walnuts into the barrel.

“Larry,” I yelled loudly. “Time to eat,” I said, which I thought was pretty funny because Larry had been eating since we walked into the store.

I headed to the one cashier, a young towny girl. I put the bag of walnuts, the three foot long hoagie roll, the jar of sliced pickles, the sliced turkey and the box of Velveeta on the counter.  Larry walked up behind me. He grabbed a roll of Rolaids from the point-of-purchase display, cracked it in half and ate the entire package. Walton was now standing next to the cashier.

“I’ll check them out,” he told the young towny girl, and then he put all of the empty packages that Larry had eaten out of onto the counter. The egg carton popped open, revealing eleven eggs.  

“What’s up, Walton?” I said, looking over the empty grocery containers.  

“Nothing much, McEnroe. Who’s your friend?” he asked.

“This is Larry. He’s visiting his brother Gene for the week,” I said. Walton knew who Gene was. Everyone knew who Gene was.  

“The whole week?” he asked.

I chuckled. Larry was staring straight into Walton’s eyes, boring a hole into his head.

Walton rang up the bread, the turkey, the Velveeta, the pickles, and the bag of walnuts.

“I don’t see where the walnuts fit in,” Walton said. He rang up the empty roll of Rolaids, and Larry leaned in. He was ready for a fight. Walton didn’t stand a chance, and there was no way I was going to try to get in Larry’s way.  Walton looked at Larry, and then he took the empty package of Ring Dings, the empty package of salami, the empty package of Swiss cheese and everything else Larry had eaten and put them in the garbage pin behind the counter.  

“Thanks,” I said to Walton. “See you around campus.”

“Yeah,” Walton said. “And during the day at the store.”

Larry didn’t say a word. Of the two, ‘Thank you,’ or ‘Sorry,’ it’s difficult to figure which one Larry had said less often in his lifetime.

About two weeks later, Walton caught up to me on campus.

“McEnroe, did Polyphemus leave town yet?” he asked me.

“Good one,” I said. Polyphemus was the giant cyclopes from Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ that we studied in greek literature class. “He left a few days ago.”

“Thanks for keeping him out of the store for the week,” he said.  

“No problem,” I said. “He pretty much stuck to a pizza and chicken wing diet the entire week.”

“How were those walnuts?” Walton asked me.

“What about the walnuts?” I asked.

“Some old lady damn near had a heart attack when she opened up one of your walnuts and found a condom inside,” he said.

“What do you mean, ‘my walnuts?’” I asked.

“Come on, McEnroe. Don’t play dumb with me. You’ve never eaten a walnut before in your life.”

“But I have. Walnuts are good for you,” I answered, quoting Uncle Mel.

He looked me up and down. For the four years I was at Oswego, I pretty much stuck to a beer, pizza and chicken wing diet as well. I was not the school poster boy for good health.

“Anyway, it was damn funny. I had a hard time keeping a straight face when the old lady came into the store to show everyone the damn condom and the walnut shell.”

I never admitted to the great walnut drop. I continued to shop at Price Chopper for the remainder of my Oswego days, and every time I walked into the store I chuckled at the two foot diameter bleached spot on the floor where the big barrel of walnuts had been.