Lemme tell ya about the time I was present at the dawn of a new fad. I know, I know, this all sounds very grandiose, but hear me out … this shit really went down.
It all started during a high school health class round about 1974. There I sat listening to Miss Bouvee discuss the inner working of the male and female reproductive systems when out of the corner of my eye, there appeared an apparition that startled and amazed the entire class. Streaking across the soccer field were the stark white ass cheeks of one Wild Bill Empie, followed by his long curly blonde locks. We were all so completely transfixed by this apparition that the diatribe of Miss Bouvee was lost to the ages, never to be recalled.
And this story would be lost to the ages as well, were it not for a subsequent old man camping drunken drug addled trip that occurred 50 years later at a log cabin in the Adirondacks.
Angry Bob, Stoffy and I reserved an Airbnb in Arietta NY for a week long camping adventure on the aptly named Stoner Lake. The rental was accomplished by procuring our cabin from the generically named personage of one Larry Johnson. More on that shortly. We spent our days drinking whisky and beer, smoking copious amounts of weed, hiking, fishing, biking, and generally having one hell of a time.
Around about our second day there, the gregarious Larry Johnson appeared to welcome us. We had long conversations about who we were, where we were from, and what we had done during our careers. Larry, it turns out was exactly the same age as me and had graduated from the same high school. I have no memory of Larry, nor did he have any other memory of me, but during our conversation, the Wild Bill Empie story popped into existence. Larry revealed that Wild Bill was his cousin and the streaking incident had resulted in him being thrown out of our high school never to return. Now I had always wondered whatever happened to Wild Bill, because I don’t remember ever seeing him again.
I guess if you live long enough, the truth is eventually revealed. In the back of my mind I had thought that maybe Wild Bill went off to become a roadie for the Grateful Dead, or possibly the CEO of some major corporation. It turned out that the true resting place of Wild Bill was much more boring than that, because Larry did tell me and to this day I do not remember what it was. So my final memory of Wild Bill’s white ass cheeks bouncing across the high school soccer field is how he shall be forever remembered, at least by this aging blogger.
Postscript – a quick Google search of Wild Bill Empie revealed that he died in 2018 at the tender age of 62, so the sombitch never even got a chance to collect Social Security.
