Adventures with Ted

I’m rich.
I’m good looking.
I’m bullet proof.
I’m invisible.

I didn’t make this up – it was on a tee-shirt of mine. These are the four stages of drinking tequila. By the time Ted and I made it to the top of the Bank of America tower in downtown San Francisco, I had reached bullet proof stage.

The barmaid brought us our beers. Seven dollars a glass, and the glasses only held about six ounces of beer. “Jesus Christ!” Ted exclaimed.

“We’re paying for the view,” I told him.

“For this price, the women should all be naked.” Ted held up his glass, examining its small size like it defied the laws of nature.

I have no idea what we were doing there. It was just something to do. The bar at the top of the big black monolith gave one of the best views of the city. San Francisco spread out before us like a map on the floor of a car. We could see everything. It was late afternoon, and the shadows were getting long.

I have memories attached to just about every landmark. There was street by a church where I’d given Jeannette a piggy-back ride all the way up the hill. We could see Coit Tower, where I have a memory with Karen. At the base of the Transamerica Tower, Brad and I had made a really funny film. I tried to explain all these to Ted, but I’m not sure if he could understand. My speech was not very coherent.

We nursed the tiny glasses of beer and stared out the window, and when the beer was gone, we left. Down the long, fast elevator and back onto the streets. On foot, because we’d left the car on the other side of the bay and rode BART in. You can walk anywhere in San Francisco.

We found our way to this most wonderful place. There was all you could eat gourmet food for free. Fried shrimp, crab legs, shish kabobs, potato skins … we’re talking some yummy stuff here, and all we had to do was buy drinks. The drinks were reasonable, too, especially compared to the $1 per ounce beer at the top of that tower.

At the time, Ted had a long distance relationship going with a wonderful woman in Sweden, and I’d brought a recorder along so that we would record things on tape and send them to her. The little recorder was on, and we were saying, “Hi Cecilia! How are you doing? Want to talk to the waiter?” Then we’d shove the tape recorder into the poor waiter’s face and demand he say hello to Cecilia.

“Hello Cecilia, how are you doing?” the waiter said. He was a good sport. No doubt he was used to this – we weren’t the only drunks he’d had to deal with. He was surrounded by them. Smiling, he brought us more alcohol as we stuffed ourselves with food.

My memories blur out at this point. It’s only because of the recorder that I know anything at all. Listening to the tape, I hear myself state that I’d gone beyond the bullet proof state and had become invisible. Ted takes over the recorder at this point, taping me as I laugh hysterically, and then narrates as I walk around the bar tipping over drinks, taking food off of other people’s plates, and grabbing women. At some point the bouncer escorts us to the door.

I have no idea how we got home. According to the tape, we rode BART back across the bay. The rest is a mystery.

The next thing I remember, my dad is waking me up. I’m at home, in my room at my parents house, enduring a hangover. Dad needs me to do something – he has a mission for me. He asks if I would grab one of my friends, drive up to Oregon, pick up one of his Terravac vacuum trucks and drive it back down to Reno, Nevada. There’s a convention there where he purchased booth space. He needs the Terravac for demonstrations.

I immediately called Ted. “Road trip!” I told him. Ted laughed like it was too insane to contemplate, and then he agreed to do it.

We headed up to Oregon in Dad’s 1976 Caprice Classic. Driving in a nice quiet car is a good way to nurse a hangover. We took turns at the wheel, and stopped only when necessary. I brought along the tape recorder, but neither of us felt like talking. I did turn it on when we crossed the boarder, saying something like, “Here we are in Oregon! Everything’s different here. The trees are so green, and the bushes are all clumped together and happy.”

We arrived at the ranch of my father’s friend, where the Terravac was, and they put us up for the night. Dad was already there, having flown up in his Cessna 310. We ate dinner, and then in the last rays of sunlight, I took Ted out to show him the land. There’s this neat canyon where you sit on the edge and yell out “Hello!” and the echo doesn’t come back to you for a full three seconds. For about 10 minutes there were all sorts of strange words and phrases bouncing around those canyon walls, until at one point another voice came echoing back to us: “Shut the fuck up!”

Back at the ranch, we ate a huge dinner and then slept like the dead. At dawn the next morning, my dad woke us up and told us it was time to hit the road. Ted elected to drive the vacuum truck. We had CB radios to keep in touch, and we rumbled off chattering away, happy and feeling good. This was fun.

It was late morning, and we were going down the highway in Northern California, and I heard a strange noise. I looked in the mirror at the vacuum truck, thinking at first there was something wrong with its engine. I was hearing a loud roaring sound. “What the hell is that?” I asked over the radio.

“I don’t know!” Ted called back.

The noise was growing in volume. It sounded like a hundred Harley Davidson motorcycles coming down the road. I kept looking in the mirror trying to see them, but there was nothing.

Something was wrong. Seriously wrong! The noise was deafening.

A sleek, fast twin engine airplane swooped right over the top of us, pulling out just twenty feet from the road and arching back up into the sky. It was my Dad! He saw us driving down the highway and buzzed us. Ted was yelling over the CB radio, “Did you see that!? Did you SEE that!!?”

“He scared the piss out of me!” I called back.

Dad’s Cessna soared back into the sky and out of sight, heading for Reno. He would arrive in an hour or so. Ted and I had several hours ahead of us. Driving in the car suddenly felt too slow. It was like riding the backs of snails.

The hours passed. We made it into Nevada, and then rolled into Reno. We found the convention, parked the vehicles, and we got our room. Dad left a message for us to meet him in the convention center, as the dinner was already underway. As I remember, Ted went ahead of me and I put our bags in the room, and when I came down the convention room was big, dark, full of people, and someone up on stage was calling my name. I thought I was being paged. So I walked up to the stage and everyone applauded, and the guy handed me a big bucket filled with dollar coins. Three hundred, to be exact.

“What’s this for?”

“You won!” the guy told me.

“Oh, thank you.” Bewildered, I wandered away from the stage while strangers accosted me with congratulations and off-color comments. My dad and Ted were waving. “What is this?” I asked Dad.

“I entered you and Ted into the drawing,” he said, laughing.

Ted was wearing his huge Ted-grin. “Party tonight, dude!” he said.

I looked down at the bucket of money. It was heavy! “Yeah, I think you’re right,” I told him. “I think it’s party time.”

I was only barely 21 years old. I had never won anything before. Suddenly I wanted to go gambling.

After dinner, Ted and I started hitting the slot machines. I won. I kept winning. I turned that $300 into about $900 in a few hours. When I started losing, I took the bulk of the money up to our room and hid it, and then we went bar hopping.

Reno is a fun place. Everyone there is friendly. Everyone! Even the cops are friendly. It’s the only place I’ve been where you can walk up and down the street with a beer in your hand, and a police officer will smile and light your cigar for you.

In the penthouse of the hotel there was an open bar, but it was so crowded that you could barely get into it. We were only there a few minutes before giving up. But while we were playing slots down on the 2^nd floor a fire alarm went off. The elevators shut down and people came streaming out the stairwells. It was only a few minutes later that we heard them announce it was a false alarm, but the people were still coming out.

We found out no one above the 4^th floor had heard it was a false alarm. “Ted!” I said. “That open bar is going to be empty!”

Ted’s whole face lit up. “Let’s go!”

We went into the stairwell and started going up the stairs as others were still going down. It was at about the 7^th floor when people started asking us where we were going. Didn’t we know there was a fire? “Yeah,” I told them. “We’ve got hang gliders on the roof.”

Ted and I made it to the top, nearly exhausted, and found the open bar was WIDE open, and we had it all to ourselves. We grabbed whole bottles of liquor and hightailed it out of there, heading toward our room with our treasures: Two Fingers Tequila, Wild Turkey, Stolichnaya, Bacardi 151, and Everclear. Everclear was special because it was illegal in California – it’s 190 proof clear grain alcohol.

In the hotel room, I filled an ashtray up with Everclear and, giggling, lit it on fire. It burned with a pretty blue flame. “It doesn’t burn that hot,” I told Ted. “Look.” I waved my hand through the fire.

“Cool,” he said, trying it. “Ouch!” He’d left his hand there a bit too long and it did burn. His hand jerked, bumping the table. The ashtray tipped. Burning liquid spread in a puddle across the table.

“Oh shit!”

We were laughing and panicking at the same time. I ran to the bathroom and came back with a towel, and threw it over the flames just before they could dribble onto the carpet. The alcohol was hot, but the fire was gone. “Damn!”

“I think we’re too drunk to be playing with fire,” Ted said.

“I think you’re right.”

We took my bucket of money and went down to the casino, and lost all but a hundred of it. Weird how, in a casino, money is no longer money. It temporarily loses value. I kept handing Ted handfuls of dollars without a thought. It doesn’t help that they keep bringing you free drinks while you gamble.

When the sun came up it was time to work the convention. I was still drunk. Ted had passed out and had no intention of leaving the hotel room. He’d covered all the paintings with towels because something about the generic art just freaked him out.

I sat at Dad’s table during the convention, handing out brochures and replaying the video over and over again. Middle-aged men with glazed eyes scanned the table for free pens or key chains and, finding none, passed on. I’d made the video, and was getting pissed off that no one was paying attention to it. It was beyond a promotional video – it was art! Didn’t these morons know that?

At one point we had a demonstration outside, and Dad and I did our standard crowd pleaser. The Terravac vacuum truck had a six-inch wide hose, and air rushed in the opening at about 250 mph. It easily sucked up whole bricks. It sucked up rocks like they were popcorn. Something like a big paper grocery bag would literally implode and disappear so fast that it looked like a magic act. After that, we had a lot of people stop by to watch the video and pick up brochures.

Ted came down in the late afternoon, looking sheepish. “We can’t keep doing this,” he said, grinning. “This is insane.”

“Insane is fun.”

He laughed, nodding. “Yeah, but…” He laughed some more.

That night after dinner, we were hanging around in the bar, spending the last of my bucket of money, and we overheard people talking about two guys who’d jumped off building’s roof with hang gliders. Ted and I looked at each other. Were they talking about us? Or did two guys really jump off the roof with hang gliders?

We never found out.

From Tales of the Lizard Hunter
By Jerry J. Davis