The Autobiography of Jeremy V

The autobiography of Jeremy V.

My cousin is a jackass. I'm not talking the Johnny Knoxville variety here, I mean he's a real fucking moron. He has an uncanny ability for getting into the most outrageous situations. It's either a skill, or proof that God exists. You see, if Darwin was right, my dimwit cousin should have died a long time ago.

I was in Naples, Florida visiting my mom's brother and his wife the summer before my senior year in high school. It's something I did most summers. For someone from Michigan, it was always a treat to get to go somewhere with warm water, sunshine, and attractive girls.

So there I was, sitting around one afternoon with my cousin Steve. Being the unemployable retard that he is, it's not like he had anything else to do. His phone rang, and he answered it. Five minutes later we were in his Jeep heading for the marina, by way of the liquor store.

"Steve, where the hell are we going?" I asked.

"Going for a booze and cruise on Lester's boat."

"Who's Lester again?"

"Oh just some gu… A friend of mine," Steve lied.

Oh well, I thought. This should be fun to watch. I had no idea how much fun we were about to have.

I'd love to tell you everything that happened that day, but I can't. As an banker and upstanding member of the community, it probably wouldn't be very healthy for my reputation. I'll just say that you should let your imagination run wild with all the possibilities that could occur among a few guys, aged seventeen to twenty-two, on what turned out to be a two million dollar yacht. I will tell you, I may have got some great shots on a disposable camera of Lester, at the helm shit-faced, wearing a captain's hat. In fact, we were having so much fun, they were the only photo's I thought to take

At the end of our fantastic voyage, Lester couldn't manage to back the yacht into the slip. As drunk as he was, he did manage to get it pulled in bow-first. I thought that it looked so odd parked along the rows of backed in boats. Steve, also drunker than an Irish wedding, tossed me his keys and told me to drive him back to the house.

When we woke up the next morning, I noticed that my backpack was missing. I searched the house, then went and looked through my cousin's Jeep. Nothing in the Jeep, just a nice collection of empty Keystone Light cans. Oh Shit! I thought. I left it on Lester's boat.

I ran back in the house. After a good five minutes of poking and prodding, I got Steve up and he called Lester.

"What do you mean you don't want to go get it?" he yelled into the phone. "We'll be there in five minutes to pick you up. We're going to the marina, and you're ass is getting my cousin his bag!" Steve shouted before hanging up the phone.

The ride over was about as terrifying as any ride could be with a grossly hungover psychopath. Hungover–hell–he was probably still drunk. I had my seatbelt on as tight as it would go. I seriously doubt it would have done me any good at the rate of speed Steve was driving. Well, hopefully it'll make it easier for the police to find my body, I chuckled in my head.

We got to Lester's place. He was waiting outside with a look of nervous apprehension. Steve yelled at him to jump in the back. Lester hesitated. "Lester, if you don't get your ass in the back right now I'm gonna put my size twelve in it. Then, I'm gonna drag you down to the marina and make you get Jeremy's god damned backpack. Get in!" Steve barked. Lester complied.

The trip to the marina was quick, although Steve had backed off the throttle a bit. As we pulled close to the parking lot Lester told Steve to stop.

"What gives Lester?" Steve asked.

"Just wait here." Lester said. He had this nervous look on his face. His skin was ghost white and he was sweating. It wasn't that hot out.

"Alright, get your ass down there and bring my cousin back his bag. Don't even think of running off Lester, I know where you live and I've got plenty of time to wait for you to come home," Steve said.

"Yeah, I'm on it," Lester mumbled as he jumped out of the back of the Jeep.

We watched as Lester made his way down the driveway towards the docks. We could see the yacht from yesterday, still facing the wrong way in the row of perfectly moored boats. His walk was almost comical. It was so obviously the walk of someone paranoid and nervous. He strode in jerky motions, always looking around. After a good laugh at Lester's walk, we saw him approach the yacht.

As Lester walked up the small gangway to get on the boat, all hell broke loose. Cops came out of the woodwork. There were some on the yacht, others popping up from other boats nearby, some running out of cars in the parking lot. Lester wasn't your average MENSA member, Lester ran.

Or, should I say, tried to. He somehow made it off the docks and into the parking lot. Lester might have had a chance if the police had not brought their not-so-secret weapon: a huge German Shepherd. The dog came blazing around some cars to Lester's right. She was about thirty feet away, ears back and flying. She closed the distance in a blink of an eye. Lester had just enough time and presence of mind to turn away. The huge canine struck him in the back at an off angle. Still, the dog's instinct was true. She had Lester by the arm. So much for running.

"Seen enough?" Steve asked in an strangely calm voice.

"Yup," I replied.

Somehow, through all of this, the police had not seen us. In their all encompassing surveillance, they missed the fact that Lester had arrived by Jeep, and not on foot. We slowly pulled away. No one followed. We were safe.

I would later learn that Lester had actually 'borrowed' the yacht from a nice investment banker from Chicago, he just conveniently forgot to ask permission. He had been snooping around boats in the marina for booze to steal one night and found that one unlocked with the keys in it. Lester was no friend of my cousin's, just some punk he faintly knew through his network of upstanding associates. Who knows why Lester invited us that day? I don't really care, I'm just glad we didn't take the fall for it. After all, Lester told us it was his boat.

"Jeremy, what was in your bag? Wallet, anything that could identify us?" Steve asked as we stopped at a red light just down the street from Steve's house.

"Not much," I struggled to recall. "Just shoes, a towel, some sunscreen. The usual beach stuff..."

Oh shit!

"…and a disposable camera!"

In my youthful kitchen

Three months of almost unyielding sunlight. It's a race against the clock, because as wonderful as things seem now, every Alaskan knows that there will be many long and dark months ahead before the next time they can fully enjoy that warm glow. That's where I find myself in this kitchen memory. It's late June. I'm in the kitchen with my father. Mom's off at either a board meeting, or an event for one of the many community service organizations she dedicated so much of her time to. I can't recall and it's not important. It's my time with Dad.


Throughout my childhood, my father made his living in much the same way I do now, away for long stretches building the remote gravel pads and ice roads that make resource development possible in Alaska. Just as I know I don't have long to enjoy this summer, I also know my Dad will be leaving even sooner.

It's somewhere around nine in the evening. We've just gotten home from a little league game, and the sun is as bright as it was at three in the afternoon. My dad has just made me his signature breakfast dish, eggs with diced ham and "spuds". It's fantastic. It's better than mom's breakfasts and that's why I'm eating it for dinner. I've got to make up for all the Frosted Mini-Wheats, and 7-11 muffins that I will consume in the hasty rush to get to school in the Fall.

We're sitting next to each other at a hundred year old antique round table. I don't know why my mother felt it was necessary for a family of three to have such a hulking relic in their eat-in kitchen. The chairs are just as old, creaky and fragile. I'm eleven and my feet finally touch the floor flat when I sit in them. I'm eating my eggs off of a cheap white Correlle plate. It has some goofy gray and pink avant-garde floral design around the edges. It's a stupid design, and just like ladies with gigantic curled over bangs, it only belongs in 1993. I'm drinking water out of an old reused plastic 7-11 cup. It's decorated in a mishmash of Alaskan themed paintings that have started to fade after hundreds of cycles through the dishwasher.

Dad and I are reflecting on something, or he's telling me a story. Probably some fantastic story about getting caught in a winter whiteout for three days in the cab of a piece of equipment. It's the sort of grandiose tale fathers like to tell their sons to make them proud of them. I'm loving every minute of it and upset when it's interrupted by the ring of the telephone. Dad reaches around, takes the gigantic AT&T cordless phone from the cradle and holds it to his ear.

"Hello", my father says.

"Uh, huh... ", his fork falls to the floor, along with his jaw. He doesn't breath for what seems like an eternity.

He regains his composure, somewhat, and says "Okay, thank you". He presses the off button on the phone, and pushes down the metal telescopic antenna, which again, only belongs in 1993. I watch him gently place the phone on the table.

I know there is bad news on my horizon. Has he been called back to work early? Is my summer over this soon?

"What is it Dad?"

My father looks around him. He looks everywhere but at me. The long pause in his reply tells me this isn't work, it's something else. He's never been this way. Even the time he got the call to be gone for sixteen weeks, he still looked at me to tell me he had to leave.

"Dad?"

My father refocuses himself. He takes his glasses off and lays them on the table. He runs his hands over his face. Then he turns towards me, but can't look me in the eyes. Instead of looking directly at me he stares at the dog stretched out on the floor between us beside the table.

"Son...
Jason...
was killed in a car wreck tonight...
his grandfather too...
they were coming back from Homer...
towing the boat...
a fucking semi hit them...
and...
they're...
gone Son."

Before his words sink into me, my Dad has left the table. He's standing at the sink, looking out the window into the back yard. He's facing away from me. My Dad doesn't want me to see the look on his face, nor the tears in his eyes. My father knows that, through no fault of his own, what he has said to me is the most painful memory I will ever have in my younger years. It's now tormenting him, because he feels a double-dose of pain and guilt. Pain for the suffering he knows he's about to see in his son, guilt for bearing the bad news that hurts me.


I look away from my father and back to my breakfast. In an instant my once warm and bright evening meal has been ruined. The eggs are cold, the spuds are soggy. The reality hits me like an avalanche: my best friend is gone. Just like the warm and beautiful summer soon will fade, he has left. However, he's not coming back. There will be no more summers for Jason. No more winters. No more sharing car rides home from hockey practice on cold winter nights. No more anything. I will have to suffer through a cold and seemingly endless winter, alone, without the hope of a bright May playing baseball with my friend to carry me through. Just ashes in an urn and a hockey rink that bears his name, that's all that will remain of my beloved friend Jason Peterson when the winter comes in 1993.

Blog Posting 3: Observing the Countryside

On the inside, the dining hall of the Aurora Hotel could be confused for any corporate cafeteria in the United States. People enter and proceed down a serving line filled with a variety of hearty meal choices, and take their seat in a large hall full of rectangular tables. The walls and ceilings are adorned with bright and colorful fixtures. The color scheme features blueish hues throughout the room. It's warm and bright, an exception among the typically drab facilities in Prudhoe Bay.

Even the most casual observer would start to notice that this isn't your typical workplace cafeteria by the attire of those present. While everyone in this room grossed over seventy-five thousand dollars last year, there isn't a single person in "business" or even "business casual" attire. Instead, everyone wears some form of industrial clothing, be it coveralls or bib overalls and heavy work shirts. Regardless of station or company, their clothing is the same shade of dark navy blue and fire retardant. While most people think of coveralls as the clothes most people wear when they do work that tends to be filthy, not a mark or stain is present on these garments.

The dining room is a rather large rectangle. The tables are laid out in rows, stretching the wide breadth of the room. People have their choice of facing the picture windows one side, or the large plasma screen television on the opposite wall.

The few that choose to take in the outside scenery typically do so in reflective quiet. Today the weather outside is clear and cold. It's mid-January and the sun has once again come up, sort of. It is just a sliver of orange light, barely above the horizon. It casts a pink hue on the pure white of the snow-drifted tundra. If it were summertime, this view would be of a beautiful arctic lake. Today, that lake is frozen to the bottom, and drifted over with snow. So much so, that if one were to walk outside, they would not be able to distinguish between standing on solid ground or frozen lake.

Those that sit watching TV usually do so while engaging one another. The big plasma is almost always tuned to Fox News. After all, ninety-five percent of these people voted Republican in the last election; the other five, Libertarian. To ask to watch CNN would be met with some slightly hostile stares, MSNBC would likely garner outright condemnation and that person would probably face alienation for the remainder of their weeks long hitch. Today's big news item is the vote to repeal Obamacare in the House.

"About time we started doing something about this socialist bullshit", a Halliburton hand can be heard to say.

"I'm glad we've started taking this country back for people that work for a living", a BP engineer replies. "I'm sick of carrying the load for all the free-riders and illegals."

I find all of this laughable. Both of these men are Alaska residents and, as such, receive a Permanent Fund Dividend check every year. The Permanent Fund, or PFD, is wealth, in the form of oil royalties, invested for and re-distributed equally to the residents of the State every year. I want to point this out. I want to tell them that if they are so against the notion of socialism  and re-distribution, they ought to give the money back from the companies and shareholders it was wrongfully displaced from.

I don't. I know to speak my mind would be career suicide. Instead I sit quietly, enjoying my salad.

I look up just in time to see two model BP employees. Model, in the sense that both of them are women in their mid-twenties and gorgeous by any standard. Their baggy coveralls do little to disguise what lies beneath. They are the type that companies like mine love to put on display. They could be the same faces they put in next year's recruiting campaign to demonstrate their dedication to diversity and show they've opened the doors of what was once a male dominated workforce.

One is tall, with long auburn hair pulled back in a pony tail. The other, slightly shorter with loose flowing shoulder-length jet black hair. I'm not the only one who has noticed them. There are seventy men in this room, aged nineteen to almost seventy. They have all stopped what they are doing and turned to gaze. This many heads wouldn't turn if the CEO of BP Exploration himself had walked in the room.


It's only natural for men to gaze at beautiful women, especially in a remote place where there aren't many. However, I see the older men of this room, long since married guys with families who could easily, be their grandfathers, gaze unyielding at these two. It starts to make me feel uncomfortable.

Everyone else in the room has gone back to what they were doing. The high-spirited chatter about the resurgence of the American Right continues. The sound of plates and silverwear banging together becomes audible again.

Moments later, I look around me and find that the five or six old timers continue to stare at the two women. They are wolfing down huge chunks of heart-disease inducing food, never taking their eyes off these beauties. I can't, no, don't want to imagine the thoughts that are passing through their minds, but I know. 

I hear Sean Hannity's nasal voice on the television. It's all beginning to become too much to tolerate. I knew I should have taken lunch in my room today. I start to get the feeling I've, in some way, been party to a massive imagined violation of these two ladies.

My appetite is gone. I take what remains of my lunch, scrape it off my plate and deposit the dirty tableware with the dishwasher in the corner by the exit. The man thanks me for taking the time to get everything off the plate, and drops it into a bucket of soapy water, then goes back to his work. I walk over to the hand sanitizer dispenser on the wall and apply a gigantic gob.

I look back to the room, and see that the gray-haired perverts are still at it. I imagine myself going over and saying something, telling them they ought to be ashamed for the overt eye-fucking they've been giving these two ladies for the past ten minutes. I think of saying something like "there's a better creative outlet for that sort of thing, guys. Ever hear of the internet?"

I finish rubbing the sanitizer in my hands. The idealist in me starts to fade. If pointing out political hypocrisy means getting ostracized, coming in between a senior company man and his fantasy romp with the hot little things just out of the college recruitment program is sure to land me a one-way ticket home. Company men are gods around here. Their word always trumps yours. There are a million and one ways they could find a policy I've violated in just the twenty yard walk from where I stand to the bathroom. I've got a kid to feed and bills to pay.

The sanitizer finishes soaking in.

I whisper "I'm sorry ladies, it's about survival today."

I walk out. I feel worthless.

Blog Posting #2: Describing an Individual

Ginny is like the "team mom" you always wished you had in Little League. As one of the senior members of the housekeeping staff, her's is one of the faces I see most at Service Area Ten, my home away from home. Although she usually keeps a baseball cap pulled down tight over her long blond hair, her omnipresent smile is impossible to miss. Although she is a woman in her mid-fifties,  and looks it, she wears the tell-tale signs of age in a way that conveys distinction, and presents a soft and pleasant appearance to others. This aging adds to the beauty of her personality the same way a rich patina adds immeasurably to the beauty of sculpted antiques.

She has a keen perception of people. It's as if she can sense when being here has caused someone to suffer in someway, be it missing a loved one's birthday, or a bitter argument with a spouse–over something that can't be reconciled until they go home, weeks from now–she makes a person feel completely at ease with a hug, or something as simple as a smile and a brush on the shoulder, even a quick off-color joke.

In a world covered by darkness much of the year, it's her personality that illuminates the rest of us. Always smiling, always positive, she makes it hard to be angry and bitter at being 3000 miles from home for weeks on end.