“Can you believe it?” he said. “She’s mad at me for being mad at her because she smoked all my fucking weed.”
Mad Dog shook his fist.
“Unbelievable,” he huffed. “So I left her at home and brought him.” He pointed at his younger brother Rick and let out the kind of frustrated chuckle that men unleash when bitching about the women they love.
Yeah, Mad Dog was pissed at his girl Cathy when I met him at Skipper’s Smokehouse two weeks ago. But last Friday he threw a birthday party for her at Royal Bowling Lanes, the one in Lutz near the Paradise Lakes nudist col … uh, clothing-optional resort.
Mad Dog has mellowed since we first became friends in junior high, which is fortunate, because the service we received at the Lanes’ bar was so piss poor that the younger Mad Dog might have grabbed the manager by his cheap necktie and bashed him with a bowling ball.
Growing up, Mad Dog lived with his mom and ruled the house from a young age: fishbowl of rubbers next to his bed, beer in the fridge, a bong in the corner and weapons ranging from throwing stars and nunchucks to pistols and shotguns in the closet.
“I find them through classified ads,” he explained to me one day after school while showing me — I shit you not — a Chinese assault rifle.
Not only did Mad Dog own more weapons while still in his teens than most lifelong NRA card-carriers, he had the temperament of a crocodile. Shortly after he relocated to Tampa, a kid slammed a textbook in Mad Dog’s face while his eighth-grade class sat on a curb outside waiting for roll call at P.E. With blood gushing from his nose, Mad Dog rose and pummeled the larger antagonist with a succession of rights that left his opponent’s face lumpy and discolored.
That was then. These days, Mad Dog splits his time between teaching physical education at an elementary school and playing poker — professionally. He has a sponsor and took home thousands from the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas earlier this summer.
But even though Mad Dog is a respected teacher (and an even more respected poker player), people like me who’ve known him since junior high are always aware that deep down inside, Mad Dog is capable of doings things like hurling someone down a metal staircase, an act he committed when we were in our early 20s, at a house party that went awry.
So when the woman behind the bar continued to blow us off in favor of the rough-looking regulars, I feared Mad Dog might get a little crazy. After all, there were three dozen of us at various lanes, raring to get loaded and bowl a few frames in celebration of his girlfriend’s birthday. But the line at the bar crept along like a geriatric slug. They were out of pitchers. They poured cocktails — very slowly — through those evil devices that allow only a dram of actual spirits into the glass.
“What is this, an intervention?” my buddy Decker said. “I feel like someone pulled a fast one on us.”
Eventually the place thinned out and we learned that the pre-made Jello shots worked just fine in keeping our booze-craving asses under control. We sucked ’em down two at a time. Everyone finally loosened up, including my best friend since sixth grade, Lauren G. She and her boyfriend Al — they would later let me crash in one of their guest bedrooms — had an interesting excursion recently.
LG: “Guess what [Al] and I did last night?”
Me: “I have no idea.”
LG: “Drove up and down Kennedy trying to get him a hand job.”
Me: “Really?”
LG: “Yeah, I wanted to, y’know, watch one of the girls jerk him off. It would turn me on.”
Me: “Interesting.”
LG: “But they wouldn’t let us. We tried three different [“massage”] places. They kept telling us we needed a reservation or something. I think they thought we were cops.
Me: “Or maybe they were afraid you would lose your shit when you actually saw another woman gripping your man’s penis.”
LG: “True. But I wouldn’t have. I don’t think.”
Decker beat me in bowling twice, but at least I didn’t lose to his girl Kristen or our friend Liz. My buddy Bryan also bowled at our lane and lost to the girl — both times.
Back at Al and Lauren G.’s place, we drank from a handle of Skyy vodka, killed bottles and cans of Miller Lite, and told tales. Mad Dog alerted the room that Cathy occasionally does not make it to the bathroom in time; Claudine confessed to being so drunk in college one night she fell out of a top bunk; and I attempted to wow the audience with my “I was on a bender and borrowed the wrong boat” story.
Around 4 a.m. I passed out in the guest bedroom. I awoke feeling rejuvenated and ready for the day — which was good because Buck tricked me into helping him lay concrete in the mid-afternoon sun, at a site where there was a fucking snake.
Royal Bowling Lanes, 1927, Brinton Road, Lutz. 813-949-3606.
This article appears in Sep 12-18, 2007.
