A TRAGEDY OF AWKWARD MEDIOCRITY

   Dave showed up at my house and essentially forced me to be in a band with him. Both of our previous projects had fizzled so I figured it was better than sitting around the house. Dave was in community college and was covered with tribal tattoos and had sort of fake dreads and always drummed with his shirt off. He was a complete lunatic and would do antisocial stuff all the time, which was usually on the edge of hilarious and terrifying. The first time I ever got in his car I was in the back seat and he had a much of rubber halloween masks down by the floorboards. I was like "What the hell?" and Mike from Adventures in Immortality (in the passenger seat) said "We put those on and then walk into people's houses while they're watching tv, steal food and beer out of their fridges, scare the fuck out of them and take off". I didn't want to blow my cool but definitely couldn't handle this level of mayhem, and later learned the Manson Family would do similar stuff before they graduated to actually killing people.

  One time I was with Dave and he drove up to a fruit store with huge bags of fruit hanging outside from the roof. He leaped out of the car, grabbed one of these 50lb bags of grapefruits and hauled ass, throwing l grapefruits at other cars and pedestrians as he speeded around Winter Park. This same day we came upon a slow traffic situation in front of an elementary school letting out for the day, with traffic cones in the road, a crossing guard, and tons of little kids and parents everywhere. I could tell Dave was going to do something and braced myself.  He centered the car over the traffic cones and slowly took them all out, dragging 7 or 8 cones down the street as the crossing guard completely flipped out. I was jumping out of my skin and sure we were about to go to jail. As we sped away from the scene dragging cones, Dave hurled a grapefruit in a hook shot out the driver's window and across the car, hitting a ten year old kid on a moving bicycle right in the nuts. I couldn't help but laugh at his evil mastery.

   The bass player lived near a golf course and we would pick him up for practice. He quit the band because we went and picked him up one time and Dave stopped the car immediately after pulling out of his driveway, leaped out, grabbed a stray golf ball, and hurled it through the plate glass window of the bass players' across-the-street neighbor.

   There’s more stories, like Dave ordering a pizza delivery and answering the door completely naked, Dave punching his own dog in the face, not out of cruelty but from an absurdist impulse,and on and on. Exhausting. The soundtrack to all of this insanity was the Jesus Lizard tape constantly playing in Dave's world.