Thank You For Being a Friend

This weekend was one of ups and downs. Friday, I was looking through a girly magazine. You can imagine my shock and dismay when there's my homeroom angel on the pages in-between. My blood ran cold. Then I turn on the TV and come to find out that it's now extremely unsafe to have sex with pigs.

Friday evening, I went to Pasta Palazzo with Jester, Lizzie, and Liz, leaving them mid-meal to head to Old Town (which should really be spelled Olde Towne) to meet up with two Australians and a girl named Heather, with whom I saw "America: All Better" at Second City's main stage.

Having never seen a main stage show before, I was pretty excited, and the show did not disappoint. It was hilarious. The only downfall was when Heather spilled a beer directly onto my pants, and all I could do was sit there and take it because otherwise I would have kneed the old man in front of me and/or accidentally decapitated the dude next to me. Several hours and several post-show beers at the Old Town Ale House later, I was all dry. All in all, a swell night, especially considering Heather knew one of the cast members, so we were able to hang out with him for a while at the aforementioned ale house.

At some point between 9 p.m. Friday and 3 a.m. Saturday, John and Ari had arrived at my place.

Saturday morning, the ladies went out to the burbs for Ari's shower. Meanwhile, John, Tron, and I headed up to Brownstone Tavern for their annual NFL Draft party, where we met up with some of Tim Weeser*'s friends (and later Tim himself). It was approximately 80 degrees and partly sunny at that point.

Brownstone's draft party is pretty cool. They have a contest revolving around correctly picking the first round. You choose the slot (not the team) where you think each player will end up in the first round, and you get one point for a correct choice in spots 1-10, two points for 11-20, and three points for 21-32. The person with the most points at the end of the first round wins a 40-inch LCD TV, a Blu-Ray player, and a surround sound system. For Tim's friend Austin, this day is Christmas.

Unwilling to come to grips with the Lions picking Matt Stafford, Tron left in disgust, with John following him, taunting Tron by reminiscing about John's one-time hope in Ryan Leaf.

Meanwhile, I tore out to a quick lead, correctly choosing the first 4 picks. Then all hell broke loose. Roger Goodell approached the podium with what should have been an announcement that, with the fifth pick of the 2009 NFL draft, the Cleveland Browns had chosen Boston College defensive tackle B.J. Raji. Instead, he uttered the five words that ultimately destroyed my chances of winning: "There has been a trade." Thanks to the Jets, I got nothing else right in the first ten picks. However, a surprising 3 correct picks in the second ten kept me in contention. Of course, more trades meant that I only got one right in the last twelve, finishing somewhere between second and who cares because it doesn't matter.

On the bright side, they were also having a raffle sponsored by Coors Light, so I won a Coors Light golf pullover and a copy of Madden '09 for PS3. Since I don't have a PS3, I sold it for $20 to a man who may be the closest real-life incarnation of Marshall Eriksen that I have met, meaning that he is a law student originally from Minnesota. Nonetheless, as the afternoon wore on, my chances of winning weren't the only thing dropping.

By the time my friend Dan showed up around 5 or so, the temperature had dropped into the 40s and it was raining. When I left at around 7, I needed my newly acquired Coors Light pullover. Frankly, I could have also used some Coors Light galoshes and a Coors Light hydrofoil.

As if losing the draft contest and a 40-degree temperature drop weren't bad enough, when I got home, a distraught Jessie told me the news: Bea Arthur was dead. "Not again!" I cried, while quickly retreating into a pile of flesh, bones, tears, and urine on the floor of our coat closet.

You see, back in the early part of this decade, I had the pleasure of receiving as a gift a pet scorpion. Not being able to discern whether it was male or female (and having no real desire to try to pick it up), I named it Bea Arthur. It was a formidable pet, but alas, the Midwestern winters were too much for young Bea.

On a Friday afternoon in March 2003, I noticed that Bea wasn't moving. This wasn't particularly extraordinary, since Bea rarely moved, but something just seemed different. I opened the top of her terrarium and sprayed her with water. There was no reaction. Then I fashioned a prodding stick out of several pens and pencils, and some scotch tape. The needlessly violent prodding revealed my worst fear: my beloved Bea Arthur had gone to the eternal humid, densely wooded habitat with a lot of crickets in the sky.

In a daze, I ran upstairs and broke the news to Stoll, one of my roommates (and a fellow Scorpio). Upon hearing the news, he began beating himself upon the head and neck with the now-famous "Scorpio sting" maneuver. When I told Tradd, he punched through a window and grabbed a bird that had been flying outside "because that's what Bea would have done."

I phoned Yeh, who I believe was in Caracas at the time, and he immediately chartered a plane to Bloomington to offer his condolences and help me lay to rest a fellow Scorpio.

The next morning was unseasonably warm, which created a dense fog, not unlike that of the Scottish moors from whence Bea Arthur came. With bagpipes blaring "Amazing Grace" from the stereo speakers through open windows, a funeral procession led by Scorpios made its way from the basement out the side door to put Bea Arthur -- mummified thoroughly in cellophane -- in her final resting place: approximately eight inches below the ground right next to the side door of a four bedroom house on the 500 block of north Grant Street in Bloomington, Indiana. Among the pallbearers were early western stars Tom Mix and William S. Hart. Tom Mix wept.

Then 2Pac's "How Do U Want It?" came on, cutting the dense air like a knife -- or, more appropriately, like a barb filled with venom at the end of a tail that is not fatal to humans. It was her favorite song to listen to when she spent hours on end not killing a cricket while Christoff and I watched her. The comparisons between her like and Tupac Shakur's were not lost on anyone. The only thing we could do to keep ourselves from crying was to throw up a "west side," get shithammered, and dance. It's what she would have wanted.

You can imagine the rush of emotions that came back when Jessie told me that Bea Arthur's namesake, Bea Arthur, had died. Sure, she wasn't a scorpion, or even a Scorpio, but it was still very hard. Sometimes people say stuff like "I wouldn't fuck her with Bea Arthur's dick." Needless to say, it will be a while before I can laugh at that again.

Saturday evening, after getting some wanton soup from Penny's (Bea's favorite -- the scorpion, that is), I fell asleep on my couch until about 11, then headed to bed where, for the next eleven hours, I had scorpion and hermaphrodite-related night terrors.

When I awoke yesterday morning, it was still in the 40s. I spent much of yesterday sobbing and compiling Bea Arthurs Memorials videos. The combination of Bea Arthur's acerbic wit and Bea Arthur's venomous barb made for some very poignant results. Trying anything to keep my mind off of the Beas, I fixed a leaky toilet in our place, after which I turned my attention to the TV, which refused to turn on. After several hours of cursing myself for not winning a new TV the day before, followed by several more hours of reading message boards full of angry Sony TV owners who had experienced the same or similar problems, I downloaded the proper operations manual for my TV and figured out that, instead of winning a new TV with draft prediction prowess, buying a new TV, or paying someone hundreds of dollars to repair my current TV, all I needed to do was tighten some screws. I'm not even kidding.

It's no coincidence that, by late afternoon, the temperature had risen to nearly 80 and it was very humid -- the ideal climate for both an 18-month-old scorpion and an 86-year-old woman. In the mangled words of James Marshall Hendrix, "And the wind cries Bea Arthur." Good night, sweet prince(s).