Sonya and I had lunch with Brandi, a friend of ours who had a baby back in December. We've known Brandi for several years, and I went to high school with her husband.
During the course of our conversation Brandi mentioned that the folks where Edwin works are big fans of this exercise in self-aggrandizement.
"It gives them lots of material on Ed!" she grinned.
Well ReDonna, Lynda, here's a little story for you. Enjoy the pictures, too!
One day, when I was a junior in high school, I left campus on my way to lunch. Edwin and another friend of ours, Jon, stopped me in the parking lot.
"You wanna go to lunch with us?" Jon asked.
"Sure," I replied, "where are we going?"
"The 'port!" Edwin told me.
You see, when Edwin was in high school his dad had an apartment in one of the hangars in the airport in West Memphis. His dad was frequently out of town. You can see where this is going, can't you? The apartment was Party Central for my little group of friends on the weekend. It was private and far from the prying eyes of any kind of authority figure. We had some big times out there.
I said sure, I'd love to go to the apartment with the guys. Could I get some food on the way?
"Aw, don't worry about it, Hal," Ed said, scooting his seat up and letting me crawl in the back seat of Jon's flesh-colored Celica. "There's lots of food at the apartment."
Hell, I believed him. Every time I'd been there before there was lots of food. And liquor. Free lunch, right?
So we get out to the airport, unlock the door, go up the stairs and down the long hall to the apartment. We get inside and Ed heads straight for the refrigerator.
He produced all manner of marvels! He gave Jon a TV dinner that looked like it had been in the freezer since 1962. For himself, he kept a shriveled barbecue sub from Subway. To me, he gave a small, heavy parcel wrapped in aluminum foil.
"Since you're company, Hal," he explained, sitting on the floor by the coffee table, "you get the best food we got."
I walked around to the other side of the coffee table and sat down. Jon dragged up a chair after microwaving his Elderly Hungry Man dinner.
I peeled back the aluminum foil to reveal a brown, roughly cylindrical object about two inches high. It could have been meat, but then again it could have been wood, also.
"What is it?" I asked, genuinely puzzled.
Edwin was obviously exasperated. "It's filet mignon, man."
Jon's eyes were wide like saucers. "It's a Hoof," he proclaimed flatly. I swear you could hear the capital H.
"Hoof," I said, resigned. It was absolutely true. The damned thing should have been on the end of a horse's leg, not in Ed's refrigerator.
I tried to eat it, really I did. But I kept hitting iron from the motherfuckin' horseshoe, man. I made Jon take me by McDonald's before we went back to school.
I have told the Hoof story far and wide. I've been asked - as recently as December - if I've had any Hoof lately. The Hoof story spreads joy wherever it goes. And now I've told it to you.
In an unrelated story, one night I got off work from Baskin-Robbins (my high school job) around midnight and went out to the apartment to pick up a porno movie Edwin was holding for me (long story - the gist of it is a friend of mine and I had ordered some porn, thinking we'd get 133 individual movies and go into the porno blackmarketeer business. Instead we got one video with clips from 133 movies. Very disappointing). I made it out there and Ed was having a beer. We sat down, watched porn, had a few beers and listened to some tunes.
This was 1989, mind you. Edwin and I were slackers before it was cool.
Here, I think Edwin looks very soulful. Like a singer-songwriter, perhaps, or a soap opera actor. The sensitive, thoughtful teenager. Edwin, I believe, missed teen-idol status by a tiny, tiny margin.
Ed and I at the junior/senior banquet, 1989. Much later that night I went to a party at my friend Jon's house. The living room was packed with people, but Edwin was nowhere in sight.
"Where's Ed?" I asked Jon after snagging a lime mist wine cooler out of the refrigerator.
"Follow me," he said, leading me to his bedroom. There, Edwin was sprawled across the bed, liberally spattered with puke.
"He peaked early," Jon explained.
