Scene: The summer of 1995, just after high school graduation.  There is a small gathering at Trent Cox’s house on the edge of town, including a mix of girls and boys that I graduated with from Stillwater High School.  It’s an exciting time for us because we were just a few months away from starting college.  Sure, most of us would go to Oklahoma State University, but there were a few with aspirations to go out of town and even out of state.  It was a big change, a clear signal that the insulated days of our youth were nearing to a close.

So we did the only thing that kids in Stillwater can do … we went to someone’s house, hung out, and watched TV all the while gossiping about all of our friends.

The Brownies: Beth Wettemann arrived with a collection of brownies.  I believe her mom, an occassional substitute teacher at our high school, and well known Catholic to the minority insiders of the parish, actually made them.  They were chocolate with caramel, fudge, and walnuts.

The Crime: The box of brownies was passed around for all to enjoy.  When the small tupperware container reached me (the last person), I had a brownie and then placed it on the fireplace that I was sitting next to.  Ten minutes later, someone asked for a second helping of brownie, but lo and behold, they were all gone, because I had eaten the remaining four brownies.  Everyone was shocked and I got several indicting comments under the breath and dirty stares from the rest of the crowd.

Verdict: I am a selfish, greedy bastard without a care in the world for anyone else, particularly their brownie enjoyment.  Or was I?

… As famed radio announcer Paul Harvey always says, “And now the rest of the story.”

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The Rest of the Story: Everyone that grew up like I did likes to pretend that no one knows the crazy bullshit that happens behind closed doors, but I’m sure that everyone had their suspicions if they ever lifted their head from the myopic haze of high school life.

At the time of the incident, I had already moved out on and was living on my own in a house that was owned, but forgotten by my father.  During high school I had lived with my mom and grandma.  My mom was out of work for about four years at that point and had made a hobby of sitting in a trash and roach infested house in her bathrobe watching day-time TV until about 4pm, eating Fudge Rounds and potato chips.  My grandmother on the other hand worked a minimum wage job eight hours a day to provide for us after allowing my mother to max out all of her credit cards and triple mortgage her house.

I vowed that as soon as I was able, I was going to move out to take the burden off of my dear grandma as much as possible, hopefully setting an example to my ambitionless mother at the same time.  As soon as I did, my grandma sold her house and went to live in a retirement village in Checota.

One thing that I can say about my childhood, other than the emotional baggage that all of the financially destitute and physically abused kids that hide behind a strike first sharp wit defense carry with them, is that I had no life skills.  I could only model off of what I saw my mother and father had done their entire lives.  I had no sense of money, how to save it, how to budget, or even setting goals.

For instance, when I went to college orientation, the counselor instructed us to write down our intended majors.  The other kids automatically wrote down their answers from the preparatory discussions that their parents had had with them over the course of their high school years.  For me, it was the very first moment that I had even considered it.  I sorta blankly stared at the input space on the form, working through the three jobs that came to mind – accountant, engineer, or teacher.  I put down history.  Oops.

The summer after high school I moved into a house that my father owned on Husband street.  My oldest sister had lived there during her college years and had fallen into disuse over the last two years since she moved to Tulsa.  It was loaded with people’s junk, a repository of stuff not important to take with you, but not useless enough to actually throw away.  I cleaned the house and began living there about a week after high school graduation.

I had absolutely no money – so I couldn’t put down a deposit to turn on the electricity, the phone, or the gas.  The Oklahoma summers are pretty brutal and I remember spending most of my days laying on the floor in a pair of Umbros in a pool of my own sweat, counting the seconds until sundown.  It was simply too hot and humid to do anything else.  I think I had a job at Pizza Hut and I rode my bike about 3km each day to and from work.

It was a tough few months, but at least I was carrying my own weight, something that had become a life goal after watching my grandma’s slow, inexorably decline under the stress of being the sole provider for the family at the age of 78 under the crushing weight of debt.

As you can imagine, since I didn’t have the money to get electricity (I literally used candle power at night), I wasn’t eating either.  I was skimming whatever free pizza I could get from work and laying awake at night wondering how in the hell I would make it through my freshman year in college dead broke (thanks Mike).

Occasionally, one of my friends would swing by to pick me up to hang out, play soccer, whatever.  On that particular day, I was taken by Mike Moore in his beautiful Escort hatch-back to Trent’s house.  I had not eaten in about 36 hours other than a few leftover pieces of bread that had not spoiled in the Oklahoma heat.

When Beth brought her brownies, I was so damn hungry.  I remember a bit that Eddie Murphy did in Raw:

If you’re starving and somebody throw you a cracker, you gonna be like this:  “Goddamn, that’s the best cracker I ever ate in my life!  That ain’t no regular cracker, was it?  What was that, a Saltine?  Goddamn, that was delicious.  That wasn’t no Saltine. That was … That was a Ritz. That wasn’t a Ritz?  God, that was the best cracker  I ever ate in my life.  Can I have another one, please?   Please, one more.”

I honestly cannot attest to whether Mrs. Wettemann’s baking proficiency is above normal, but at that moment those were the best god damned brownies I had ever tasted.  I was not eating them as the tasty treat as intended, but instead as sustenance for basic survival.  I felt bad after I realized that I had eaten all of them, surely, and twice as bad with all of the damning looks from the well-fed, middle class kids judging me.

Of course, in retrospect had I just gone to my friend Trent and said “man, I haven’t eaten in a day and a half” he would have happily turned me onto his pantry, but other than sneaking some pretzels and oatmeal cakes, I was too embarrassed to ask.

I’m not writing this column to excuse the fact that I did eat all of the brownies, but rather to remove a notch from my deeply held vault of Catholic guilt.  I’ve got this list of events in my life that continually bug me because I either screwed up, misrepresented myself, failed, or whatever that continually pop back in my head.  They bother me, so I am ticking this one off the list.

So just so you know – I’m not as selfish as you think I am.

Or at least I wasn’t then.

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