Rebellious Youth Without Girlfriends.

I wish I was more of a fun kind of guy, the kind of guy who could and would do things that are "fun" without at the same time doing things that are "guaranteed to result in a sprained ankle."

We all know those "fun" guys. They're around when we're growing up, and they have names which can be shortened into fun names, like the "fun" guys did when I was young, like "Rupe," which was short for "Rupenthal." "Rupe" when I was younger was part of my brother Matt's group of friends, a group that I joined sort of by default and sort of by virtue of the fact that I was living back at home at 19 and most of my friends had gone on to do other things: Bob and Fred had gone into the army. Eric had gone off to college, and, we heard/probably made up later, freaked out on acid and wandered off somewhere to join a cult, and Pat was also living at home but was going to school.

Eric was the smartest of our group in high school. Eric was smarter than me, which my parents didn't and don't like to hear, but it's true. Both Eric and I were naturally smart, the kind of naturally smart guys who can naturally get an A on their paper on the play MacBeth without ever actually reading the play, something that I thought would never, ever, come back to haunt me -- how can not reading MacBeth ever become a liability?-- but then it did come back to haunt me, because Sweetie was reading a headline the other day about Governor Blagojevich's troubles, and it referred to Mrs. Blagojevich as "Lady MacBeth."

"What did Lady MacBeth do?" asked Sweetie, who seems not to have taken a British Literature course that she then had to fake her way through because British Lit is really boring and hard to read. Sweetie knew that I had taken British Lit because I fall back on it all the time in my effort to continue to give the kids mixed messages: I alternate between telling them that they need to study hard and get good grades and that the studying hard is what leads, directly, to good grades, and then I tell them, later, about the time I got a 108 -- out of 100, earning 8 extra credit points -- on a paper about The Canterbury Tales, and I hadn't even read The Canterbury Tales.

My exact answer to Sweetie's question was this: "She helped MacBeth do something. I think there were witches involved. Or maybe she did something to MacBeth."

Sweetie's exact answer was "Oh." She sounded a little letdown, so I added, to bolster my claims:

"I'm pretty sure there were witches."

Eric would have known whether there were witches, and what Lady MacBeth did to later be compared to a 21st-century political wife. Eric was the kind of teenager who was more prone to spending his weekends home reading and doing homework and doing whatever else it was he did, while Bob and Pat and Fred and I drove around in Bob's old white Impala, trying to get people to buy us beer and hoping that we could find girls who would not mind that we were the kind of dorks who acted cool but who also made up, during study hall, a claim that we were part of a revolutionary organization named "Rebellious Youth Without Phones," an organization devoted to proving that Ulysses S. Grant was the best president ever, and to also having Riboflavin declared the national food additive.

We fostered those goals by once telling the Advanced Placement U.S. History teacher that we thought Ulysses S. Grant was the best president ever, which made him actually sputter, and by writing "R.Y.W.P." on blackboards in empty classrooms.

Seriously.

It's amazing to me that I was not voted the prom king.

Eric did not take part in that kind of tomfoolery; Eric was only nominally part of our group and did not hang out much with us on the weekends, because he was busy having a future which would not be dominated, as some of ours are, by blogging when he should be paying attention during a seminar. Eric was the least-fun, and accordingly most successful, of our group. However, Eric paid a terrible price for missing out on what we thought of as "fun" during high school, because when he went to college, possibly at Michigan State, Eric snapped from the pressure of being so smart and studious and good all the time, and he did acid and he wandered away from campus and nobody heard from him again.

Or at least that's what the story was. That story made the rounds between graduation and the 10-year reunion, people who knew Eric telling others how Eric had lost it, telling the story as proof that, yeah, we'd spent a lot of time at the teen bar ("Jellybeans") and even more time sitting in my basement drinking beer we got my older brother to buy and talking about what we'd be doing if we were at the teen bar... but at least we had gotten our wild oats out and had not gone off the deep end. Our parents may have frowned in dismay when we told them that we were not going back to the UW after winter break and may have frowned even harder in dismay when we got a job working on an assembly line that spring, but did they want to be Eric's parents, wondering where their formerly-brilliant, now drug-addled psychotic kid was?

I actually think that rather than wandering the Earth in a deranged stupor, Eric ended up being a veterinarian at Ohio State University. Six of one, half dozen of the other.

It was because I made those choices: don't read MacBeth, do hang out in a 1968 Impala, don't go back to school, do work a drill press next to Carlos, a guy who would regularly get stoned before work, so stoned that he once drilled his hand and didn't notice-- because I made those choices I got adopted into Matt's group of friends as the people I would hang out with for the next few years, until I finally got back to school because assembly lines and gas stations aren't all that fun to work at for a few months, let alone for an entire lifetime.

And it was when I joined Matt's group of friends that I got to hang around my first "fun" guy, the kind of guy I imagine Chris Farley was -- crazy and funny and able to do anything. Matt's group had one of those ("Rupe", as I said) and had it's own Eric, called "Andy" in Matt's group. Andy was everything that Eric was to our group, smart and funny and hard-workiing, but Andy had two other things going for him: he was also athletic, and he looked like he should be on the cover of a teen magazine. Andy actually stayed with our family for a while when his own family had troubles, and my sister Katie used to go look at him with her friends. "Come on," she'd tell her friends, "Let's go look at Andy." And they would, a bunch of 11 year old girls standing in the doorway watching Andy drink gallons of orange juice right from the jug while watching TV with his shirt off.

With all that going for him, you just knew Andy was going to end up worse than Eric, and he did: So far as legend has it, Andy too wandered away from college in a drug-induced state, and I think he also killed a guy. (Our group was not very creative with the horrible endings that befell those who seemed destined for success. We might have, in fact, been better if we'd read MacBeth. Then, along with drugs and wandering, witches could have been involved.)

I'd always thought of myself as a fun guy -- as the fun guy of our group, in fact. But as part of Matt's group, I learned what a real fun guy is, or was, at the time. Real fun guys can do anything they want. Real fun guys can be at a pool party, and can be standing on the deck of the pool, and can come up behind two hot girls in bikinis, and can grab both of them and go "Let's go, ladies," and pick them up and jump into the pool carrying them, at the end of which, the girls will bob to the surface, wet and giggling and laughing and splashing, and will say things like "Oh, Rupe!" and he will laugh his hearty, real-fun-guy laugh, and splash back, and later on he'll totally make out with one of them.

Guys like me cannot do that. A guy like me who tried something like that would slip before grabbing the girl and twist his ankle. Or he would grab the girl and twist her ankle. Or her top would come off and he'd get charged with sexual assault. Or she would fall into the water, hit her head, inhale water, have to be revived, and it would all end up with the ambulance taking her away and the rest of the people at the party looking at me and saying "What were you thinking?" And there would totally be no making out.

So for the couple of years that I hung out with Matt's group in between college and more college, I watched the fun guys, like Rupe, do the fun things, and I always thought to myself, I wonder how you get to be the fun guy? What is it that separates the Rupes from me, that allows them to chase a girl through the house and tickle her and not have her step on a beer bottle and break it and slice through their foot, so that what was supposed to be fun ends up as stitches? How is it that some people can leap up and crash down on the volleyball net, bringing it to the ground and the game to a halt, and yet everyone laughs and thinks it's funny, whereas if I tried that, I'd get "What were you thinking?"

I know what it is that separates me from the Andys and Erics, after all: they did their homework. They did not, when told to read Slaughterhouse-Five, skip reading that so they could instead read the Crisis on Infinite Earths comic series, the result of which is that they would guess wrong on the quiz on Monday and end up having to read even more when they got home that night. Andys and Erics always knew what happened to Billy Pilgrim in the cave and never got themselves into trouble by forging notes to get themselves out of physics class, as I did, but it wasn't really my fault.

I had to forge notes to get out of physics class because I didn't like going to physics class. It was first hour in my senior year, and it was boring. Physics itself isn't boring; physics itself is exciting. Physics class, in my high school, was boring, though. It was taught by Mrs. Kaiser, and Mrs. Kaiser did not have an exciting cell in her body. Physics helps explain why curveballs curve, why black holes are black, why those spaceships in Independence Day would have torn the Earth apart before they even got close to Washington D.C.

But physics in Mrs. Kaiser's classroom was this: Hold a ruler up, then drop it and see how fast you can catch it. That was an actual experiment we did. I remember it to this day. I don't know what it was supposed to teach, but whatever it was supposed to teach, it didn't work, unless what it was supposed to teach was how to hate physics, in which case it worked brilliantly. So I skipped out of physics every so often, something I could do because Mom at the time was working third shift, so she didn't get home until 8:30 a.m., and Dad left at 6 a.m. I even had a brilliant ploy: I faked up a note that excused me from class because I had to go pick up my Mom from her job as a third-shift nurse, and signed it with a reasonable facsimile of my mom's name.

How that genius scheme fell apart occurred thusly: Mom, one day, actually did need to be picked up from work, and I did have to miss physics, and she did write me a note, which I stupidly turned in to the office as my excuse. A few hours later, I had to go talk to the Principal about that, and he showed me the notes I had written, and the note my mom had written, and said to me that he wanted me to admit that I had faked the note my mom had written. As evidence, he used the other five notes or so that I'd written and signed, and showed me how the signatures on those notes all matched, while the signature on the note from that day was clearly different.

He seemed proud of himself, so I didn't make things worse by correcting him. I falsely confessed to forging the note that day and got a day's detention. That was actually kind of a cool thing, in my book. I only got detention two, maybe three times in my whole high school career, and detention was something that was cool to get, as we'd all learned from The Breakfast Club.

The other time I got detention was when Fred and Bob and I decided one day to just up and leave and go driving around in Bob's Impala. We decided to walk out the main entrance to the high school, a decision that seems dumb until you consider this: We didn't see any teachers watching the doors. So we walked out, and Mr. Brill, who was the track coach and who taught a class on the History of the United States in the 1960s, and who taught, so far as I knew, nothing else, and whose class focused primarily on (a) giving the dirtball kids who smoked and worked on cars a History credit and (b) playing The Who's "Baba O'Riley", Mr. Brill stopped us and asked if we had a pass, at which point we did a version of Who's On First ...

Me: [to Fred] I thought you had the pass.

Fred: [to Bob] I thought you had the pass.

Bob: [to me] I thought you...

... until Mr. Brill stopped us and gave us detention. And made us go back in.

That, and the riboflavin thing, constituted the "fun," "wacky" part of my high school career, forming the basis for my personality now, today, as a guy who's not one of those "fun" guys.

"Fun" guys don't stop being fun guys just because they get out of high school, after all. They're still "fun" even when they're thirty or forty or fifty. They can exist in law school, where they can give long hugs to my girlfriend (Sweetie, before we married) and pick her up off the ground when they do so, and do that without their own girlfriends getting jealous and without throwing out Sweetie's back the way I inevitably would if I tried to do that -- not that I would try to give a long hug to someone else. But if I tried to give Sweetie a long, lifting-up hug, it would have to be followed up with a long, helping-out trip to the chiropractor because I'd crack her vertebrae.

I know I would, because even little fun things that I try to do go awry. Like the other day, when I got home from work and wanted to surprise Mr F at the door. Each day, when I get home, Mr F and Mr Bunches hear the big garage door opening, and they get excited. Then, when I get out of the car, I start calling "Hello," and calling out their names, and they come rushing to the door, where they wait until I turn the handle and then they open it.

So the other day, I got out of the car, and I said "Hello!" and got to the door more quickly as I called their names. I was going to open it a little, and then when I saw them, throw it open more quickly and surprise them. That was my plan, and you'll note that it included checking before I threw the door open, because I didn't want to hit them with the door.

So I got up to the door, and I opened it a crack, and I peered in and didn't see them standing there, so I yelled "Hello!" and threw the door open, but it didn't throw and it didn't open. Instead, it went two inches, made a big thunk! and stopped dead.

So I did what anyone would do in that situation: I pushed it harder and got another thunk!, at which point I peered in and saw Sweetie standing there, doubled over, holding her head.

"What are you doing?" I asked. I don't pick up on things all that quickly.

"You hit me in the head," she said.

I eventually sorted out that she'd gone to open the door for me, because Mr F and Mr Bunches were busy in the playroom knocking over the slide. Just before I'd thrown the door open, she'd bent down to move the blanket that was blocking the drafts from under the door, at which point I had thrown open the door, hitting her in the head. Twice.

She didn't blame me-- for long-- and she's okay. But things could have been so different, if I was a "fun" guy. If I was a "fun" guy, I'd have yelled "Hello!" and the door would have swung open and Sweetie would have maybe tripped and fallen onto the couch, gently, while giggling, and I'd have come in, and she'd have laughed, and I'd have laughed, and maybe shotgunned a beer.

And then we'd have totally made out.