During the spring of my senior year in high school, some of my friends and me would cut school on a nice, warm sunny day and go skinny dipping up at a secluded water hole at the downstream part of Union Village Dam. All the cool party people knew about U.V.D. because you could go there and drink and smoke and not get in any trouble. You had to walk about a mile through the woods and fields to get there and it was very private. It was great.
Of course, most of the locals knew about it, but it was still a very remote kind of place. It was a cool place to swim, even though the water was too cold for most humans to be in. I hated cold water and still do to this day. I don’t even like getting wet most of the time. It’s always hardest for me to first get in, but once I do, it’s usually okay.
I guess I feel that way about life some of the time.
Another cool thing about U.V.D. (that’s what we called it if we were on the phone and didn’t want our parents to know what we were talking about) was that the rocks were really smooth and you could slide down the rapids. They were either pretty mellow or bigger and rougher if the dam operators let out more water. You just never knew what the rapids were gonna be like, but you always knew that U.V.D. was a cool place to party.
We used to get our beers from Dan and Whit’s Country Store. We’d say, “Let’s go get some Stubbies and go party up at U.V.D.” or, “lets go to D Dubs and get some Stubs.”
One time, a bunch of us were there and we were doing our usual thing: drinking beers, smoking pot and skinny- dipping. Droolson, whose real name was Mike Toolson but he chewed tobacco and drooled a lot so we called him Droolson, was with his girlfriend, Krispy Thompson. Her first name was Kristy, but she used to party a lot with us and she partied HARD so I called her Krispy because she was frying her brain.
She’s all grown up now, married with twins and calls herself Kristen. But she’ll always be Krispy Thompson to me. Sometimes she calls me at three in the morning, drunk, and tells me how she misses me and how she should’ve married me instead of her successful banking-finance-executive- Squares Ville guy.
She pours her little heart out to me in the middle of the night and I keep telling her that if she ever wants to come and visit me that she’s invited. But she never does, ’cause in the morning she probably doesn’t remember calling me. Poor Krispy Thompson. She’s rich, though, and has fake D-cup breasts, but even those don’t make her happy.
I’ve never seen ‘em, but she tells me that she’s still hot and runs a lot and stays in amazing shape. She was really hot in high school, but always had little A-cup boobies. Not anymore. I bet she’s super hot now. There seems to be a trend in America with older women becoming surgically re- designed M.I.L.F.’s.

So, me and Toolson and Krispy Thompson and Goat and Drain Wilmont and Pea-Nut Stone and a few others were down by the river, drinking beers, grinding gears, and dropping queers. That’s what the rednecks used to say during holidays when I’d come home from college and see them in the local bars.
I’d say, “Hey man, what are you up to?” They’d say, “grindin’ gears, drinkin’ beers, bungin’ steers, and droppin’ queers.” I’m not so sure what bungin’ steers means, but the rest is pretty self-explanatory.
One of the main rednecks from our town lived right up the street from me when I was growing up. His name was Greg Moulton and he had bright red hair, like all the other kids in his family. He was skinny, ugly, and a real redneck. He ended up being the doorman at one of the bars in town andhe’d card all the pinheads.
Pinheads were the Dartmouth students. They called us the Townies. There was a certain rivalry between the Dartmouth Pinheads and the local high school Townies because quite frankly, there wasn’t a big difference in size and age.
Greg Moulton would be working the door and carding everyone and finally he got the POWER that he so deserved and had sought after his whole life. He was in charge of the door at 5 Old Nugget Alley and he was prepared to fight to the death if someone tried to pass that door without his permission. He was in charge and he made sure everyone knew it. I guess now I know where those parking lot people come from who will risk their lives in order to get their five dollars or get run over trying.

Back at U.V.D., me and the gang are getting our usual good and drunk and everything’s fine.
For a while, that is.
Toolson decides to show off for his girlfriend and do a running, jumping dive into the water. The problem is, some parts of the water are deeper than others. In this case, it’s about three inches deep and solid rock under that. Unknowingly, Toolson dives in with extra force and when he hits that bedrock with his arm first, something really bad happens. He breaks his arm and the bone sticks right out of his forearm and he’s in pretty bad shape.
I’m right there and see the whole thing unfold in slow motion. When the accident happens, Toolson is so embarrassed that he’s been stupid enough to dive into a half inch of water that he pretends it didn’t happen. He’s a little bit in denial. He tells Krispy, and of course she doesn’t want anyone to know either because she doesn’t want anyone to think that she’s stupid for going out with someone so stupid that he’d dive into a half inch of water. So she keeps the charade alive — for a while that is.
Krispy helps him out of the water and instead of screaming and telling everyone that his bone is sticking out, she tries to hide it and makes a little sling for him out of a scarf or something. That works for a little while. But he’s losing blood and going white in the face. He’s in shock. He’s slowly going unconscious and about to die from a lack of blood but mostly, humiliation.
He could fool some of the people, but he can’t fool me. No sir–ree.
I casually walk up to Toolson and say, “Hey, man, I saw you dive into that shallow part of the water over there and it seems to me that your arm’s broken.”
“No, it isn’t,” he says.
I say, “Yes, it is, I can see your bone sticking out.”
Toolson sticks with his story, “No, it isn’t, there’s nothing wrong with me.” Krispy’s right by his side and she’s sticking with the story that nothing is wrong and that they just don’t want anyone to know what’s going on.
I said, “I can see it right there. Look. See? Your bone is sticking out right there.”
I point to the white part of the bone that’s broken and sticking out of his forearm. I mean, like, what could he say to that? He so wants to hide his broken arm, but I pretty much have him busted on that one. I guess his philosophy is he’d rather keep quiet and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt. In this case, I speak for him and bust him.
Denial is not just a river in Egypt. So, he cops to that fact because he knows he’s in trouble and BUSTED by me, and then I tell everyone what’s happening, and we all rally and basically carry him through the fields and woods, uphill, to the main road and call an ambulance and get him to the emergency room.
He probably would’ve just stayed where he was and bled to death if we hadn’t done something. It was odd, dragging Toolson all the way up to the road with a bunch of stoned and drunk guys. Some of the guys that helped us weren’t our friends, and in fact were rednecks from a neighboring town we didn’t like.

It was really more like they didn’t like us. But in a real crisis, people band together and do what’s necessary. It’s kind of like, what if aliens attacked the Earth? We, as a planet, would be forced to cooperate with each other and fight back. Maybe that’s the only way this world will ever survive — if we can find a common enemy to keep us focused instead of constantly killing one another.
Not.