Punchy Greg.

     In Fort Collins, Colorado all of our friends were named “Sketchy,”  “Crazy” “Dirty” or “Slippery.”  Everyone had a nickname.  So for example there was Crazy Jen, who was different than Sketchy Jen, and there was also Crazy Louie, Throttle-Head, Sketchy George, Burger, Pistol, Dank Denny, etc.  If you were fun and partied you were “Crazy,” but if you started acting foul you risked getting stuck with the “Sketchy” moniker.  Of course you could be downgraded from Sketchy to Slippery, like what happened to Slippery Rick, if you ripped someone off for money on an herb deal.  If anyone used our real names we knew instantly that they were narcs or undercover.  But there was only one Punchy.

 

     The first time I met Punchy Greg was when Reilly drove me up to his house past Horsetooth Reservoir.  He had gone to high school with Reilly in Connecticut, and hung with their really crazy crew.  A few of them graduated from keg parties and LSD to smack once they went out into the real world, but then there were guys like Reilly who had fun but kept it clean and were doing well.  It was a beautiful Colorado spring day and we noticed that the water level was high in the reservoir from all of the snow runoff, so it would be ready for waterskiing soon.  One of the most fun things in the world was to be Reilly’s road dog.  You learned to be ready for anything – accompanying him on a quick errand could lead you to repo’ing a car in Denver, visiting a friend in a multi-million dollar mansion with Lambroghinis and Ferraris in the driveway, or making deliveries to a house full of hot Colorado State chicks in sundresses who wanted us to stay and smoke and drink Fat Tire with them all afternoon.  The possibilities were endless and my job was to not ask too many questions and keep my eyes open at all times. 

 

     We pulled off the main road and drove up a gravel driveway at an impossible angle like we were heading straight into the hill.  His house was more like a hidden bunker; a collection of redwood boards bleached by the sun in need of a fresh coat of stain.  As we got out of Reilly’s Escort a few mangy dogs without collars ran past us.  There was stuff everywhere – a canoe filled with rain water with frogs living in it, abandoned parts of car engines, tarps covered with black paint, a pile of firewood, and two mountain bikes with flat tires.  I didn’t know what to expect from a guy named Punchy…was he a boxer or something?  A huge muscle-head bar-room brawler?  Actually I had to look down, not up when I met him.  Punchy was lucky to be 5’4” tall.  He didn’t make eye contact when we met and seemed turned off by the idea of shaking hands but did lisp a quick hello, exposing his tongue ring.    He had black shaggy hair and wore oversized hand-woven hemp pants that made him look like a little kid in a potato sack race.  He was definitely, well…punchy. 
 

     He bounced around his place with nonstop nervous energy, extremely uncomfortable in the daylight.  He led us to his garage and seemed more at ease among the musty pitch blackness.  Punchy led the conversation to how the government was out to get everyone but he was ready, showing us his new AK 47 assault rifle and gas mask.  He was somewhat of an anarchist/survivalist nut and preferred to hole up in the seclusion of his property in the hills instead of mixing it up with polite society.  It was hard to believe that this guy grew up along the shores of affluent Connecticut.  It was finally revealed to me why we had come up there – Punchy blew glass and was teaching Reilly how to do it.  “Blowing glass” was a process where an artisan heated a kiln and then removed molten liquid glass, spinning it around on a rod and blowing air into it at the same time, forming stunningly beautiful glass pieces like decorative butterflies, necklaces…or water pipes.  That’s what Punchy did to make money: he blew glass pipes and bongs in his garage and sold them at the shows and music festivals.  He could make a bunch of nice pieces and get rid of them at a Phish show or Samples concert at Red Rocks and make $1,000 over a big weekend.  That money was used to sometimes buy food, hardly ever pay rent, and always feed his incessant drug habit.  It was pretty amazing to see him go to work in his garage studio, a whirlwind of activity that formed beautiful glass sculptures drizzled with bright colors out of liquid glass and air.  Punchy explained a little how he did it and Reilly practiced on a couple pieces.  A few of them didn’t come out right so they threw them into the barrel of discarded broken glass remnants, but one pipe came out pretty good so he cooled it and kept it as the day’s prize.  A pretty hippy chick in a flowing dress appeared out of nowhere, barefoot and with nappy hair, and brought Punchy a glass of wine and a perfectly-rolled joint to smoke.  She didn’t offer any acknowledgement that we were there other than a smile, and she didn’t offer us anything to drink.  But we all smoked.  And smoked and smoked and smoked.  By the time we left, maybe three hours later, I felt like a rainbow of molten glass myself.  I was too high to really understand the exchange, but somehow Reilly ended up with a green lowrider bicycle that was all chromed out.  He had me carry it to the car and put it in the trunk and we exited Punchy’s world in cloud of dust.     

     I didn’t see Punchy for few months and Reilly didn’t talk about him much.  We were playing golf one day on the public course – which really consisted more of getting shit-faced hammered and trying to crash our carts, and to my surprise Punchy showed up.  He rolled up in a beat up old Volvo station wagon with two-year old registration stickers and got out wearing a loud pair of plaid cocktail pants and a tucked-in golf shirt.  He rolled out a set of $1,000 golf clubs and went out with us on the course looking like a mini doped-up Rodney Dangerfield.  Our day on the range was going great until on the 7^th hole.  It was about a two hundred twenty yard drive to the pin.  We were congregated on the putting green, slamming Bloody Marys and finishing our round, when we heard a far away voice yell “Fore” with some urgency.  The fourseome playing behind us had teed off, thinking that we were well out of distance and not dreaming of hitting a two hundred twenty yard drive.  We heard something ripping through the leaves of the trees above us.  We all scattered and dove out of the way like we were in the rice paddies of ‘Nam and a grenade just went off.  The ball screamed down and hit Punchy right in the kneecap, sending him to the ground like he had been shot.  He screamed in pain and rolled around the green clutching his rapidly swelling knee.  We stared for a second in disbelief – what the hell were the chances of someone hitting the best drive of their lives and then richocheting the ball right off of Punchy?!  Our stunned silence gave way to laughter once we saw he was ok.  He wasn’t too happy with the whole situation, and limped over to the cart and took off, cursing at the foursome before getting in his Volvo and disappearing.

     I came back to visit the Fort a year later for graduation weekend.  We had a bunch of friends graduating so we all had a blast partying like banshees.  I was living on Gatorade and ice cream sandwiches during the day until the boozing started in earnest every afternoon.  Denny, Wes, and Johnny had a big graduation party at Avagadro’s Number, a cool local bar with an outdoor patio.  Everyone was drinking beers and celebrating their emancipation from the world of education amongst friends and family.  It was a nice, classy affair.  At one point in the evening this hot girl came up to Reilly and told him that his friend was weird and really scaring the other guests.  I looked over and there was Punchy in the corner, looking rough as hell.  He wore a black sweatshirt with the hood up, even though it was 80 degrees in late May, and I’ve never seen a human being look so white.  His skin was so completely devoid of color that he looked almost transparent, like you could see his bones and junk-filled veins right through his skin; an apparition.  He was accompanied by the same Hippy Chick I’d met at his place, but she looked healthy and smiling as always.  I went over to Punchy to say hi and purposely didn’t mention the golf ball-to-the-knee incident. 

“Hey Punchy, wassup man – how ya been?”

“Dude I’m all fucked up on Crystal - haven’t slept in three days.” Punchy said, rubbing his black eyes.

“Oh…gotcha.  Right on man.”  I responded, not knowing what to say.  I assumed that was the desired effect of that particular narcotic. 

“No, not right on man.  It fucking sucks.”  Punchy barked back, obviously agitated.

     Our conversation got cut short because there was some commotion.  Wes and Denny were kidding around wrestling and Reilly came out of nowhere with a running start and threw a visicious flying tackle on both of them, wiping out two stoners with 220 lbs of red neck pro-wrestling furry.  It took a minute for Denny to peel himself off the ground and he was yelling at Reilly that he was an asshole and holding his ribs.  The next three days as we drank and partied day and night Denny was convinced he had the worst case of heartburn ever, and ate Tums and drank Pepto like they were going out of style.  It took him a week to sober up and go to the doctor when the pain kept getting worse, and found out he had a cracked rib. 

By the time everyone got up and brushed themselves off and the party resumed to normal I looked over and Punchy was gone – vanished into thin air like a ghost.  I’ve never seen him again.                 

     What happened to him?  According to Reilly this is what went down.  Punchy and his sketchy girlfriend moved up to Truckee, bunkered up in a little cabin in the woods where they could do their drugs and relative privacy.  The two of them were doing a lot of the Brown Lady and crystal and got really strung out.  Back in Colorado Punchy knew enough people to make some scratch selling the overpriced glass pipes that he blew to hippy college kids any given weekend at shows.  His girlfriend, who, unlike Punchy, still had half a foot on this planet, helped with the sales and together they could make enough to support his habits for a couple more weeks.  But in Truckee he was out of the loop and more isolated, probably not even blowing glass anymore because he didn’t have the shop in his garage.  They started hurting for money in a big way.  When an addict lacks money to buy his stuff it’s like a fish on dry land in a puddle of water that’s drying up.  I imagine they first they sold everything they owned, which wasn’t much to begin with, and I can picture Punchy running around his cabin frantically picking up a cheesy lava lamp from the 1960’s and yelling at his shell-shocked girlfriend, “How much can we get for this lamp?!  The lamp!  The lamp!  Can we get $20 for this lamp?!!!  Put it on Craigslist immediately!”

“But honey, we already sold the computer last week,” she would inform him.  He would stop short in his tracks and look at her funny as the impact of this news sunk in.  The puddle was drying up and the fish was starting to flop around in panic. 

So Punchy, in his infinite wisdom, in an effort to feed his addiction, did what any of us reasonable, tax-paying citizens would have done in his situation: he built a home-made bomb, strapped it to his body, and walked into a CVS pharmacy and held up the place.      

     
     He mixed fertilizer and orange juice and paint thinner and whatever the hell else people use to make homemade explosives and poured it into canisters that his girlfriend strapped to his torso with duct tape.  She drove him to the local pharmacy, gave him a kiss on the cheek and wished him luck, and kept the motor running as he ran in with a red polyester Member’s Only jacket covering his bomb.  Once inside he played it cool.  He pretended to browse through the sunglass carousel for a while, trying on an over-sized pair of banana-yellow women’s sunglasses that made him look like a midget porn star at a Laker’s game.  He then worked his way past the antacids and laxatives and condom section back to the pharmacy counter.  Punchy started yelling that this was a stick up.  The pharmacist, a middle-aged Chinese cat with coke-bottle glasses and a bad hair piece, had to stand on his tippy toes and look down over the counter to even see him.  At first he thought Punchy was going to flash him, revealing his diminutive man-junk as he unzipped his red jacket.  That would be the third flashing this week, all men in Member’s Only jackets.  But no, this little hippy with half-crazed eyes was waving his arms around and yelling about a stick up.  He peeled back his jacket to reveal a couple canisters of an ominous looking liquid duct taped to his body connected with wires and tied into a digital egg timer.  Punchy pointed his finger like a gun and screamed “Give me the Oxycodone, Vicodin, Fentanyl, diphenoxylate, propoxyphene, hydromorphone, and meperidine and put it in the bag mother fucker!  Oh and a pack of that Juicy Fruit.  No, that not that one, the original flavor.  Thanks motherfucker!” 

     At first the pharmacist couldn’t understand him because of the bad lisp from his tongue ring, making it sound like “Vinny the fizzle with dimples uses hydroxicut with moped juice…and put it in the bag motherfudder!” but asking him to repeat himself only got him agitated, jumping up and down like a rabid spider monkey, so the pharmacist just opened a bag and started throwing every pill and prescription within arm’s reach into it.  Punchy was sweating like a whore in church and looking like he might blow up the whole store at any second.  The pharmacist thrust the big bag of goodies at him over the counter.  Punchy grabbed it, gave him the finger, and ran back through the pharmacy and out the door, grabbing a pair of banana-yellow sunglasses on the way out.  Hippy Girl was parked out front in the loading zone with the motor running, and gunned the engine and ripped out of the parking lot in a cloud of smoke. 

     The incredible thing is that they got away!  They actually got made a clean escape and retreated back to their cabin without anyone catching wind of what was going on or even getting the license plate number.  By the time the pharmacist unfogged his coke-bottle glasses, adjusted his hair piece, and got around to calling the cops they were long gone. 

     If the story only ended there it would have been a happy ending for Punchy, as perverse and twisted as that may seem.  But something went very wrong.  By the time they got back to the cabin Punchy could barely contain himself, popping a few pills to satiate his junk sickness.  He dumped the contents of the bag onto the floor and sorted through them like a little kid at Halloween.  He grabbed a little of this and a little of that and started downing opiates like they were lifesavers.  Hippy Girl tried to warn him to slow down, but he kept throwing down pharmaceuticals with the vengeance of a smack-head mad at the world for denying him for a few days.  She implored him to take it easy, but he wasn’t listening.  Unfortunately Punchy downed way too much without reading the warning labels or consulting with his primary care physician.  His eyes rolled into the back of his head like a slot machine coming up all cherries.  He fell backwards onto the floor, knocking over and breaking the lava lamp and sending pills rolling everywhere.  Hippy Girl screamed and ran over to him.  Punchy’s skin had turned a beautiful shade of alabaster blue and he had a strange half smile on his face, even as he was OD’ing.  She slapped his cheeks and tried to drag him into a sitting position, but he was dead weight, even if it was only 145 lbs soaking wet with a brick in his pants.  The water had been shut off for nonpayment of the bill a long time ago, so Hippy Girl shook up a can of Mountain Dew and opened it on his head, trying to revive him, dousing him like a Nascar driver in the winner’s circle.  Then she panicked and called 911.

     I’m not sure if she was composed enough to gather all of the pills and threw them into the woods while the ambulance was on its way, but I’m pretty sure she hid the homemade bomb under the dirty futon.  She was officially freaking out as her boyfriend, the love of her life, the one man in the world who made up for her daddy not giving her enough hugs when she was eight years old, lay convulsing on the floor with drool coming out of his mouth, doused in Mountain Dew.  The paramedics got there and took over attending to Punchy.  They asked her what happened.  She probably said something like that he took too much cough medicine or mistakenly ate Pop Rocks with his soda, but I’m sure they weren’t buying it.  A cop car pulled up and a cursory search revealed a ton of pills, a homemade bomb….and a pair of banana yellow sunglasses with the CVS tag still on them.  Winner winner chicken dinner.  They took Punchy to the hospital where he was handcuffed to the bed and got a good old-fashioned excruciating stomach pumping. 

     The good news is that he lived.  The bad news is that he had plenty of time to reflect on his good fortune as he did six to eight in Quantico.  I only pray that the sodomites didn’t take his diminutive stature and tongue ring as an open invite.  He wouldn’t make a very good prom date, even if it were in the joint. 

     I just hope that he was ok and turned his life around.  We were all growing up and struggling to find our place in the real world, and I’m certainly not one to judge.  Most of us moved out of town and went our separate ways.  I had got in a little trouble of my own and wanted to get the hell out of the Fort, so Reilly helped me sell my car.  For a while there I was just biking it around…on a green lowrider that was all chromed-out.  It had shocks so I could bounce up and down as I peddled.  When they saw the bike kids ran out onto the street after me, cheering and yelling that they wanted a ride.  I swerved around the wide, sunny streets, grooving to the music in my head, and thinking: “Thank you Punchy for letting me use your bike.”