the world has turned and left me here

the wasabi eating contest

Frisbee team co-captain Matt and his outrageous British accent are leaving Lincoln for good in less than a week, so Saturday we threw a surprise party for him at Lincoln's only sushi bar. As we waited in the back behind folding Japanese screens I came up with a great prank. I poured soy sauce into a wine glass--lots of people were drinking wine--and told people I was going to get Andy to drink it. Andy's a freshman punk (and hence underage) who of all people deserves to be had the most. No one believed I could pull it off, and I was going to wait for the right moment to spring it on him, so they forgot.

But about two hours later with a beer in one hand I casually handed him the glass and asked if he wanted to drink the rest of my wine. Without even smelling it--we figured you could smell the salt from about 3 feet away--he took a big gulp, all eyes on him. He was drinking water for the rest of the night.

Later I challenged Craig (Mark's youngest brother) to a wasabi eating contest. The game as I imagined it is like chicken, you keep matching your opponent in quantity at each stage until someone backs down. Now I don't know if you've ever had wasabi: it's like taking a flamethrower to your sinuses.

We started with about twice this much on a cucumber roll, and both of us made it through tearless. The second round was three times as much and as I stared Craig down, laughing as it started to kick in for me, his face and eyeballs turned red, tears welled up, and he gagged. I thought he was going to puke but he made it through and then conceded; he'd had enough. But to beat him I had to show that I could eat more. We rounded up all the rest of the wasabi on both trays--it dwarfed the roll, there was more wasabi than roll, even the owner of the restaurant conceded that it was a ridiculous amount. The crowd counted to three and then I was in a world of hurt for about fifteen seconds.

I didn't make any attempt at all to keep a poker face on, I just tried to remain standing. My face must have been all screwed up like an evil wry tribal mask. Like Craig I almost tossed the cookies, and when I finally got it down and looked around I felt weak in the knees, and my hands were shaking. Someone took pictures and I will try to post them.

Well this was just the launching pad for the evening. I tied a balloon to Matt's collar that said "Good-bye" (might as well have said "One night stand?" we joked) and we all trooped off to another bar. When the bars finally turned us out on the street, the balloon suddenly broke free and off it went into the night sky, all of us shivering and waving to it in the cold.

So then we went up to Matt's apartment which is on the eleventh floor of a downtown apartment building, and commands a great view of Lincoln. If you can call a view of Lincoln Nebraska "great," that is. For this reason the random group of intellectuals who followed us from the bar got to talking about Lincoln, the sort of way I used to think about Munich when I would climb the belltower for $1.50 and look down on it, immense but somehow vulnerable to analysis.

One guy with bulging eyes and fish-lips covering bunny teeth kept telling us "this town needs to be rocked," and had some big plan to wreak Merry Pranksters mischief among all the straights and stiffs. That someone would actually try to change this place & people was an idea I'd never even considered before. Since the day I saw Lincoln as it is, it's seemed hopeless & I've known I would leave, never to come back again.

There was another weird guy up there who looked like a cross between Michael Jackson and Milli Vanilla, with a leather jacket and mop-hanging hair, who seemed content with the fact that he was here, working in the library and trying to make it big as a guitar player. I found him super annoying.

I also saw a guy who used to live at 12th and D earlier in the semester--one of my favorite hangouts, not as good as Joe's house parties back in the day but still strange & good--even though I didn't recognize him at first. He told me that house has been a non-stop party for about 30 years, and has been the birthplace of quite a few bands; it would be interesting to read the history of that house I think.

Anyway as things were winding down my friend V got into conversation with a skinny but fierce-faced guy hugging a vodka bottle about an old friend of hers, a travel agent who used to be a normal dude but now has apparently gone nuts on acid in Albuquerque. What a wild world we live in--I tend to forget that.