THIS MAN DRANK ALL OF MY BEER AND FILLED THE BOTTLES WITH PISS

   I had mowed lawns for a couple years with my mother's lawnmower, for which she charged me rent, and spent the money on the second issue of Mad Magazine.  When puberty hit and I wanted to start playing music, and asked my dad if he could help me buy a guitar and he said "If you really want one, sell your prized possession (referring to the Mad) and you'll have the money". He took me to the comic store and goaded me into selling it at a loss. I still didn't have enough money. Maybe he felt bad, and helped me make up the difference to buy a suoer shitty guitar and amp for $100 from the classifieds in the newspaper. 

   Me and mom moved across town, and I finally met some kids who were into music. One day I was home by myself and frustrated playing guitar alone, and I took two five gallon buckets out of the garage, sawed the ends off, and made drumheads out of duct tape. They sounded like crap but looked sort of cool. I called up my new friend Chris to come over and check them out and tried to get him to play drums.  He sucked pretty bad, but he eventually bought a bass and we discovered  this kid Wes could keep time because he was in the marching band. 

   We made an unholy racket, and since we didn’t have the ability to learn songs we had to write our own. We still had an expanded bucket kit, my best invention being a metal trash can lid with rivets added to approximate a crash cymbal. I don't know if the Wes's parents had money, but suddenly a real drum set  materialized in his garage.  We managed to play a Killdozer song but Wes didn’t approve of the lyrics, which were admittedly terrible, and because he had the drum set we listened to him and ditched the song. Our high school had an event called “Air Band” which was essentially a lip synch contest with people doing choreographed dances and karaoke singing over top-40 hits. Somehow we ended up playing our first ever show at this event, performing an original instrumental song, which was kind of off-brand for the event. At the end Wes sort of smashed his drum set, and I remember thinking, you better still be able to play that kit. Smashing precious musical instruments is the baston of the rich and spoiled. No poor kid ever smashed an instrument. 

   Another high school idiot named E.J. was always trying to get people to play music with him but he sucked, and one time another kid went over to his house and E.J. smashed his only guitar solely to impress this guy, thereby ending the project.