RL437 - The First Betrayal of Kevin

This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: Everything defaults to your Mom, referring to John having to change schools when his mom moved to Anchorage because everything defaults to your mom.

The show title refers to John getting his new friend in Junior High Kevin Horning in trouble a lot, the first time at a Halloween party shortly after they met in 7th grade when he came as commandos together, but John washed his face paint off and changed into JR.

Raw notes
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John having a turkey dinner yesterday and M&M's for breakfast (RL437)

It is labor day. John has been coughing this morning, but that probably came from his breakfast of M&M’s and his body recoils when he does a thing like that. They were paired with coffee, but when he was at the grocery store late at night they had a point of purchase enticement family sized bags of Peanut M&M’s that you buy to share, even if it is with yourself. Peanut M&M’s are the best kind and they also had the new Peanut Butter kind, and John likes to mix stuff, he had a turkey dinner at the diner last night.

His sister got the hot turkey sandwich and the only difference between the two was $3 and stuffing and it was worth it. For Merlin this almost falls into the extra meat for a dollar, which technically falls into make all the bacon. Don’t deny plenty, especially if it is inside your budget. They could have put a little more gravy on it, but the stuffing is meaty beady big and bouncy, which is what John wants. John is not good at making stove-top stuffing at home and has never tried it. He doesn’t want sage in the stuffing because that makes it taste like it has been picked off the dirt.

It was at 11:59pm, they close this grocery store at midnight, but there is someone in there all night stocking the shelves, so John doesn’t think they should close the store and most stores around here used to stay open with only one register. The same was true when Merlin lived in Florida where they realized that they were in there anyway and the only difference was that customers could come in now and utilize this one lane.

Like if it is 2am and you want a loaf of bread, a quart of milk, and a sick of butter (reference to some song, see some other episode!) and you go to the place, wave a hearty ”Hello!” to the people who are stuck in the Cheerios, you get your things, go up, stand at the register, and wait patiently until the assistant manager who is stocking the produce wipes their hands on their apron, comes over, and rings you up for these things, which takes 30 seconds and they can go back. All the electricity is already on and all it requires is to keep the door unlocked for those who don’t wake up until the late afternoon.

Merlin wished his neighbor Happy Labor Day today, but when you are self-employed you don’t have a Labor Day because who would care. Sleepy podcaster gets no slack!

When John was at the grocery store he bought 2 sharing size bags of M&M’s: One peanut and one peanut butter, he brought them home, got out a big glass cookie jar of the kind that you might steal a cookie from on top of the refrigerator. They always had a clear cookie jar when he was a kid while others might have an opaque one. Merlin had a set of aluminum canisters, one that says Sugar, one that says Flour. They did not buy a ton of cookies and when they did it would be something like a Nutter Butter. It was a special thing when John’s mom made cookies.

John is about to start a podcast with his mom, and she wants everybody to know that in order to get a cookie to stay soft in the cookie jar you don’t put more butter in, but counterintuitively you put less butter in. The butter makes them crispier, like a chicken, and you put less butter in to make it chewier.

John combined both bags of M&Ms in the cookie jar and mixed them up, so that with every handful you get some of each kind, which is what he likes. He like a little stuffing, gravy, mashed potatoes, but he doesn’t want any Rosemary and there aren’t any in these M&Ms. Maybe nobody has ever said Rosemary M&Ms until now and it is a phrase that should not have been uttered. Merlin gives it 6 months until there are at least two competing restaurants in Portland with herbal cookies, and not that kind. John is sure they already have that, he has been in places who have offered him licorice fudge.

People getting cute when it comes to food (RL437)

When it comes to oregano and sage you need to make sure everyone in the party shares a feeling about them. John also doesn’t want dill or rosemary, but he will put dill on a salmon. People made chicken for thousands of years without rosemary, when did it become The Thing that goes on chicken? It is part of the whole ”pickle everything” school. You can’t just have a crispy chicken that is baked in its own butter. Don’t get cute about it, just make a fucking chicken. America got a little cute!

Like everything it was so exciting when it first happened., when the young chef came out the kitchen who was from around there and everybody knew him already because he worked in this other restaurant as a sous chef, there were only a couple of chefs at the time, there wasn’t even a chef school, like when John’s great grandfather became a justice of the peace, he didn’t go to law school, he was barred to be the scrivener until someone said: ”We need another judge out here!” - ”Huhhh!”

John remembers the first time when a guy younger than him started a restaurant and they all went there all the time, John’s girlfriend got a job there as a waitress, it had some name like The Seeing Cake, it was way before all those Portland style restaurants and before the one with the benches outside. It was at the time that when you went to a restaurant in Portland you got a chicken with crispy skin and a side of vegetables, you would get normal food.

But in this restaurant there was no menu, but a blackboard with some things written on it in someones hand that you couldn’t read so the server had to explain it. There was a lot of seafood, and it was in the way that they would get the best meat and then devise the menu, not the other way around.

Merlin doesn’t want flowers in food, just stop being too cute! They are all too close to the flame and don’t see how cute they are being and it is not helping. There is an ice cream parlor in Venice beach that only serves ice cream made out of flowers and laurel leaves and ketchup. It is like Berkeley and Merlin is glad that Berkeley exists, but he doesn’t want everywhere to be Berkeley. We need Berkeley to tell us when we have gone too far. If there is not a lot that says: ”All dogs can only be served fair trade coffee!”, the kinds of things where you don’t even know to begin.

Merlin used to think this about Texas. When he was a kid in Florida it was Texas and Southern California where all the crazies were. In Texas it is the law of large numbers because Texas is so big. Now Florida has stolen their crown and now Florida is the home of crazy. Merlin likes Berkeley and they are a lot of fun, but they are also awfully cute.

In Washington that used to be Olympia. Bellingham was always Bellingham, Tacoma had a very unique character and there wasn’t anything cute about it, it had zero cute. In New Orleans if you have a drink in a cup, as long as you are using a straw it is not considered an open container, which is extremely cute. Merlin has been told in Florida that when you buy your 12-pack of Bush you need to put it in your trunk, because if it is in the passenger compartment it is in violation of some open container adjacent law.

John’s first time in Texas, swearing as a kid he would never go there (RL437)

John didn’t go to Texas until he was in The Long Winters and at their first show in Texas they were driving there to meet the band Centro-Matic and played a show together at the Rubber Gloves in Denton. They came at it from a weird direction from Memphis on a long drive, and the whole way John was thinking back to 7th grade when ”Who Shot JR?” was on everybody’s list? It was the apogee of Southern Culture on the Skids (band). People were really into watching Dallas every week, but John didn’t watch it because he was a Ginnett (?). He didn’t watch Falcon Crest or Dukes of Hazard either, maybe a little bit. His mom was anti-Southern, she didn’t like country music and thought it was Hillbilly yodeling.

John always thought she was a Ginnett (?) because her great-grandfather fought in the civil war for Ohio, but partly it was because her father, her brother, and a large portion of her mother’s family all moved to the South. Denton forms a triangle with Fort Worth and Dallas. This is where The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton is from (song by The Mountain Goats), but John takes issue with that because the best ever death metal band is from Finland. Merlin’s favorite genre of Death Metal is Melodic Swedish Death Metal. Denton is Central North of Texas because there is nothing North of Danton and nobody wants to be up there. They talk a bit about metropolitan areas. Gainesville does not have one. Boulder became a rich Hippie enclave because they nimby’ed themselves and told you that you can’t have a Taco Bell or similar.

As they were driving toward Texas John was having an identity crisis because he was 32 years old, he had never been to Texas and it felt like he had done it intentionally in order to honor a pact that he had made as a 12-year old in 1981 when everybody wanted in on ”Who shot JR?” and he swore on the Dungeon Master’s Guide that he was never going to go to Texas. At the time in Alaska there were many oil people from Oklahoma, Texas and Louisiana because they had just completed the pipeline and their Southern accents conflicted with Alaska’s native Minnesota accent as evidenced by their vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

The language guy in Wired talked about why some people in New Orleans sound like they are from Brooklyn. Norwegians emigrated both to Minnesota and Alaska directly from Norway back when it was farmers and fishermen. They were up there in Palmer and Wasilla speaking their dialect and they just sounded like they were from Wisconsin, that is why Sarah Palin talks like that. They weren’t up there as some kind of prominent people, but they got kicked out of Norway for some potato famine or something, they were just farming people, and the people who ran Downtown Anchorage all spoke like they were from Newhaven because they were.

At the time the vice president George HW Bush was ”from Texas” although he barely was, and there was all this Texas talk, the fascination had moved from Alabama where the bandit was peeling out (?) all the way to Atlanta. John told the guys as they were driving that he had sworn an oath he would never go to Texas and he doesn’t just swear an oath lightly.

They were excited to meet Centro-Matic, they were about to go on tour with them and leave Denton together and go on tour with Varnaline over to the West Coast and back up to Seattle, a tour that made The Long Winters and Centro-Matic tight bros. It was one of their first tours before Pretend to Fall is even a twinkle in John’s eye. They got John their first European record label Munich Records, then John got them their Spanish label Huston Party Records, they toured Europe, they did everything.

John was desperate to find a solution to this problem because a part of his heart wanted to cancel the show and not go to Texas because he had made this oath, and as he was driving there they were talking about it in the van and none of his band-mates understood how such an oath could be binding 20 years later. John decided to break this ancient oath, but the only way he could do it was to go all the way, which means that as soon as they cross into Texas, the first place that sells cowboy boots they were all going to buy cowboy boots.

They found a giant place that said Boots on the sign, they pulled off, John was shaking with nervousness, worrying if this was going to work, and inside there was a kid that was 5’2” who got really tight Wranglers on and a big hat and pointy boots and he said they had come to the right place to get cowboy boots and everybody came back with cowboy boots. They showed up in Denton, meeting Centro-Matic for the first time, and they were not wearing cowboy boots and nobody else at the Rubber Gloves because that is not what is happening there. They were like in the Far Side cartoon where the Vultures got a hat on: ”Howdy! Howdy! Howdy!”, but it broke the spell.

John compares this with how Spain annexed Portugal. On John’s oath, on his honor to help other people and obey the law of the pack, he came in the back door of the oath and said: ”Heeeyah!” and nobody expected it, he basically took off the paint and became JR again!

John’s school situation in Anchorage, his mom moving to Alaska, meeting Kevin Hornig, going to a Halloween party (RL437)

John started 7th grade at Wendler Junior High, he had gone to North Star Elementary. Then his mom moved to Alaska across the Seward Highway. John had moved to Alaska and he had left his Kindergarten to 4th grade friends back in Shoreline, he went to North Star because he lived with his dad who lived on the West side of the Seward Highway just North of Fireweed, but his mom moved to the East side of the Seward Highway on Ingra Street, while his dad lived over on East 24th Avenue which was just to the North of Fireweed on the West side of the Seward Highway.

Now his mom was here and everything defaults to your mom, which would have meant that he should go to Romig Juior High, which was associated with West High, but his mom, bless her heart, moved less than a mile from his dad and now he was going to Wendler Junior High which was associated with East High because he was on the East side of the Seward Highway. All his elementary school friends were now going to Romig while John was going to Wendler, but those were still his old friends and you are trying to have playdates with them and it doesn’t work out because all of a sudden you don’t recognize them.

Someone from North Star who was now going to Romig invited John to a Halloween party. He had never been to their house before. He had made a new friend at Wendler, school starts the day after Labor Day, meaning John started at Wendler 41 years ago to this day in 1980, and he met Kevin Horning who had just moved to Alaska from Seattle and he did not want to be in Alaska and he didn’t like it, he wanted to go back to Seattle because that is where his friends were, and he had lived in England with his parents, he knew all this stuff, he had heard of The Police and New Wave music by this point, all this shit that the rest of them did not have. He had gone to second base while John still didn’t know what ”going with” meant.

He and his girlfriend had been in a park in autumn when they leaves were falling and he took some leaves and stuffed them down the front of her sweater and she said: ”Get those leaves out of there!”, it was an elaborated pas de deux (see RL51). Kevin was John’s brand-new friend and he didn’t know anybody in Alaska, he was almost a year older, they were in Miss Dexter’s science class where they all sat at big tables with a black lab table surface, and John asked Kevin if he wanted to join him at this Halloween party and why don’t we go as Commandos, like a G.I. Joe? They would put camouflage paint on their faces, wear camouflage, and be commandos together.

John got Kevin in trouble a lot playing commandos. One time they were running around on the roof of the Alaska Railroad Building with toy guns and they got chased down, which happened within weeks of this Halloween party, which was the first time John betrayed Kevin and it wouldn’t be the last time. John had on all black and the only black jacket he had was a suit jacket, like a blazer, and he had black leather gloves and a black cowboy hat, and shoe polish on the face in a camo style pattern. Kevin showed up in what would be a better version of this costume. He had a camouflage insulated brown hunting suit head to toe in oak tree camo that you would use to hunt deer in the Midwest, and he had a green Radar O’Reilly hat with ear flaps and also the black face paint.

The party was a bunch of kids that John knew from elementary school, but also a bunch of kids from Romig Junior High that John had never seen before, which was weird, and he was bringing his friend from Wendler Junior High that nobody had ever met before. This was the first time John ever saw dry ice in a punch bowl, which was very exciting because it was fucking bubbling and smoking, it was rad! John was thinking to himself that this was a terrible mistake. Had it only been his 6 best friends from elementary school it would have been really weird to bring Kevin, but in fact it was 6-10 people he knew from elementary school and 10 other people he had never seen.

The smartest kid at their school who had aced every test was Dominador Gobaleza. Right behind him was Laurie Basler and John was sending so many love hearts to her across the room that bounced off of her, but it may have distracted her just enough that she missed one question and that was why she was always behind Dominador. In third place was John, widely regarded as the most gifted kid in the class, whatever that meant. Then there was Matt who was running a distant 4th and he could handle Dominador being the smartest kid, he was also the sweetest, and you can’t argue with Laurie Basler because anything she touches turns to gold.

Matt had always been number 3 and he was comfortable in that position, but in 5th grade John came from Seattle. Dominador and Laurie had no problem with John, but Matt was aced out and was a white ribbon now! He deserved it because he was shriekly, he was trying to form alliances and undermine others, basically John turned him into Fredo (probably Fredo Corleone from the movie The Godfather).

John was standing in the doorway of this party, they were kicking the snow off their boots, and Matt came over, John was no longer a threat to him because Matt was going to Romig now. Matt looked John up and down and asked: ”Are you JR?” John had a cowboy hat on 1980, with black leather gloves and a blazer, of course people would think he was JR! John looked around the room and this was a 7th grade Halloween party and this was the year people stopped wearing ”costumes” and started wearing ”costumes”. There are no princesses or Tony the Tigers, nobody is dressed like Yogi Bear, and you are wearing something where there is no freaking shoe polish on your face. You are trying to look cute with each other.

Here is the first time John ever betrayed Kevin Horning: John went into the bathroom and washed off his face paint and he came back as JR, which was against his character in every respect, but he was panicking a little bit and realized he had a great costume on and washed the paint off. For the rest of the night everybody thought John had a great costume and ”Who shot JR?” while Kevin was leaning against the wall, dressed in a very hot hunting outfit with a hat on and his face painted and everybody wondered who that stiff was.

John had removed his context. Kevin was a good sport about it, but there was nothing he could do because they had been dropped off there and the grown-ups were coming back later, you couldn’t just go to the phone and call your mom, that would also have been the least cool thing he could have done, and he just sat and took it.

John was very close to JR and is to this day, the kind of dangerous, maybe not that good, the one that everybody knows and kind of likes, but also kind of don’t. By taking the paint off and arriving back at the party as JR, what more JR move is there than that? Kevin was leaning against the wall as the commando, John was the JR, he betrayed his friend, and he was the hit of the party.

Now Matt was cajoling up to John, trying to get some of John’s reflected glory. As John walked out of this party he had learned that the most JR thing about him was that he had betrayed his friend and Kevin told him so as they were driving home. This was the beginning, and John and Kevin are still friends and they still talk on the phone. Also: John’s initials are JR, he is literally JR!

Over the years John sent Kevin surprise-gifts that were maybe a little too much because he had betrayed him so many times over the years and little gifts aren’t going to do it and John would need to give him $5 million to make it up to him, and Kevin wouldn’t even want that, it would be more for John than for Kevin.

John was never going to Texas, even at this point at the party. Kevin betrayed John many times, he used to hold John’s face down in the snow, he made out with Christie Kata (?), he had a girlfriend before John, he was kissing Mary Balldorf (?) on the side and when John called him out on it Kevin punched him and then John kicked the side of Kevin’s truck and Kevin told his dad about that and Dr. Horning called John’s mom.

John had just turned 12 years old, Kevin was almost 13, and wearing camo to the party meant that John walked into that party as an 11 year old and walked out as a 12 year old, and Kevin walked into it as a 12 year old and walked out probably as 15.

The ending music was layered with the sound of a gong.

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