The Bobs
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| Me moving in for a Kiss with Kevin "The Jerk" much to his girlfriends disgust... |
Like most of us, I had a group of friends I hung out with in grade school, junior high, and senior high school, as well as my initial attempt at college, Valparaiso University. Born a boy, that group was male although since my teens I have always had female friends as well. The members of the group changed along the way but there were always a group of guys around that I did things with. Once I hooked up with Donna and dropped out of college I never really had a regular group of male friends again. I tended to only have a friend or two at any one time. The exception was when my brother came out to California to live with me.
After my break up with Kathy I moved out of the Sunnyvale house to my own place in Los Gatos. Pete and Frank continued to live there and they found a new roommate, Laura. Although Laura was close to Pete and Frank's age, she was a bit of a throw back to the 60's. She reminded me of the girls I used to hang out with when I was more Pete's age. It was at this time that I once again started regularly hanging out with a group of guys.
Initially there were five of us: Frank – Kevin – Jack – Pete – Me – Later There was Steve, who moved out from Massachusetts and joined us.
Frank: Moved out here from Pennsylvania – He was Pete's roommate when Pete first moved into a place after coming out west – He was more conservative and cautious than the rest of us. Frank is married Mary and I think moved back east.
Kevin: Californian – His family had money but he lived very frugally – Pete knew him from school (Heald College) - We gave him the nickname of “The Jerk” because of his eccentric behavior - He objected to the nick name which meant we would never stop calling him that. The last time I saw Kevin was at my brother's wedding like 30 years ago.
Jack: Also a California guy – He was a good friend of mine from Tymshare – played guitar and taught me how to play a few songs – Other than my brother Pete, Jack was my closest friend during this time. He married Crystal (I think that's her name but with me you never know – I am excellent at messing up names).
Pete: My younger and only brother – Pete got lots of attention from the female gender – (Pete you should skip the next line.) - He had a sort of Robbie Benson look and he hates that comparison so if you see him don't bring it up - Women would often come up to me and ask about him - Jack once asked me if I got tired of women trying to use me to get to Pete - I replied that I thought they were using Pete as an excuse to talk with me - It didn't occur to me they were actually only interested in Pete - As my wife will attest, I tend to think that everything is about me - Is that a bad thing? - Pete's married, has two boys, and is living in Cape Cod.
Me, Dave: You know all about me from reading this blog...
Someone in the group came across a book called “Church of the SubGenius”. It was modeled after a supposedly 1950ish salesman JR “Bob” Dobbs whose image looked a a lot like Ward Cleaver (“Leave It To Beaver”) smoking a pipe. The book, or rather the Church of the SubGenius is a parody religion that praises “slack”. I've always valued having slack time and am currently in the midst of trying to convince our new dog, Frankie, he should too. We all found the book, and it's praise of slack, humorous. We started using quotes from it and we started referring to Bob as if he was one of us. Soon we started sometimes calling each other “Bob” when one of us did what we felt were “Bob” type things. We started giving Bob as our name in certain circumstances, like a salesman or someone we met at a bar. We next started making “Bob” the sponsor of all our parties. Every party we threw we called “Bob's Party”. We eventually even had Tee-Shirts made up. People would come to the party and ask for Bob and we always gave some excuse – like “He just went out to get something” or “I just saw him heading towards the kitchen”. When the cops came to shut us down, which they regularly did around the 10 o'clock hour, they would ask where Bob was and when we told them he wasn't there at the moment they would tells us we better find him because he needed to shut his party down. The “Bob Parties” were famous for closing down by 11. Well, they did not actually close down but they dwindled down to just a few of us. Laura's friends, along with Laura, would take many of our attendees away to another party. While that worked out well as far as the cops were concerned, we were not too fond of her so dramatically downsizing our party. As a result, we began to not tell her about our “Bob” parties until either the day before or the day of the party, hoping fewer of her friends would show up and whisk our party attendees off at a moment's notice. As you might imagine this did not go over that well with Laura and soon she became quite resistant to us having any more parties at the house. Not to be deterred, we planned our next party and called it “Bob's Laura Surprise Party”. She was initially quite pleased that we would throw a party for her but she became a little suspicious when she realized there were not many of her friends at the party. In spite of all this we all liked Laura and I think she liked us. I know she liked Pete at least, and I gotta think she liked me as she often suggested that she and I should go out together.
Another “Bob's” activity was our on-again-off-again search for a good neighborhood bar. Pete and I grew up in New York and Frank grew up in Pennsylvania. We would often talk about the neighborhood bars we hung out in back east. These bars were a bit like the bar in the TV sitcom “Cheers” except they were smaller and a little more dingy. We lamented that they did not seem to exist out here. So every now and then we would dedicate an evening to trying out some bars in search of a like kind neighborhood bar we were used to. Our plan was simple. We'd visit a small bar we hadn't been to and have a beer to get the feel of the place. If it was not what we were looking for we'd move on to another one. We stumbled onto some interesting places and some not so interesting places and of course a few times we realized that we should leave immediately. One evening we walked into a place that at first seemed decent and so we all sat down at the bar. At first everything seemed fine. The bartender came over asking us what we wanted. It was at that point we realized this doesn't feel right and we may be a wee bit out of our element. It wasn't exactly a hard core biker bar but it was the kind of place where as an outsider you could expect trouble, the kind of trouble where you are likely to get your head bashed in. Now we generally drank beer but we usually looked for what was then referred to as micro brewery beer (today is more commonly called craft beer ) and if not that then imported beer. Frank was sitting on my left. He and I looked at each other with an ut-oh look on our faces. Realizing that this was not the time to inquire about “specialty beers” Frank turned towards the bartender and said in a low rather gruff voice “Bud”. Budweiser was a beer we would never order under normal circumstances would order. I watched Frank and when the bartender looked at me I gave the same reply in the toughest serious voice I could come up with. Pete was on my right. He looked over at me and then followed suit as did the others. We got our beers and paid the bartender. We basically chugged them, plopped a tip on the bar, and got the hell out of dodge. Once safely outside we all burst into laughter, partially out of relief feeling we were lucky to get out of there without incident.
Our normal local hangout was PJ's, a singles bar with a dance floor. We would frequent it most Wednesday nights and sometimes on Friday. On Wednesday's we usually stayed until closing. It was ladies night, cheap drinks for women, so women were well represented. The thing was that we were quite inept at meeting women in bars. None of us were the forward or chatty type. We did have my brother who attracted women but for the rest of us not much ever happened. The bar always closed down by played Frank Sinatra's version of “New York New York” and I can't think of that place without having that song go through my head. I would get to bed after 2 on those nights but I'd be at work by 8 the next morning. How did I do it? I don't rightly know because I couldn't do that today. Maybe that's a reason why I don't hang out with a group of guys anymore...
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